The Best of Gene Wolfe Quotes

“We have treatments for disturbed persons, Nicholas. But, at least for the time being, we have no treatment for disturbing persons.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction

“so often I get optimistic and explain the best method of learning to write to students. I don’t believe any of them has ever tried it, but I will explain it to you now. After all, you may be the exception. When I read about this method, it was attributed to Benjamin Franklin, who invented and discovered so much. Certainly I did not invent it. But I did it, and it worked. That is more than can be said for most creative writing classes. Find a very short story by a writer you admire. Read it over and over until you understand everything in it. Then read it over a lot more. Here’s the key part. You must do this. Put it away where you cannot get at it. You will have to find a way to do it that works for you. Mail the story to a friend and ask him to keep it for you, or whatever. I left the story I had studied in my desk on Friday. Having no weekend access to the building in which I worked, I could not get to it until Monday morning. When you cannot see it again, write it yourself. You know who the characters are. You know what happens. You write it. Make it as good as you can. Compare your story to the original, when you have access to the original again. Is your version longer? Shorter? Why? Read both versions out loud. There will be places where you had trouble. Now you can see how the author handled those problems. If you want to learn to write fiction, and are among those rare people willing to work at it, you might want to use the little story you have just finished as one of your models. It’s about the right length.     P”
― Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe

“There are men—I have known a good many—who work all their lives for the same Fortune 500 company. They have families to support, and no skills that will permit them to leave and support their families by other means in another place. Their work is of little value, because few, if any, assignments of value come to them. They spend an amazing amount of time trying to find something useful to do. And, failing that, just trying to look busy.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe

“These chaps everyone’s been shouting at to change things, they’re the very chaps that do so well as things are. Think they’re going to make new rules for a game they always win? Not ruddy likely.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe

“If you don’t know I can’t tell you. Yes, I can; because I want to turn things around. Like, everybody all the time only does it for himself or something he sees being part of him only bigger, an empire or a church, like that. I’m doing it for ants, to set us loose.” The bearded man said, “You stoned?” “Sure I’m stoned. Ken, I’m stoned blind.” “You don’t look stoned, man.” “Trust me.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe

“The time came. We had just bought a new car, small and cheap—but brand-new. I was returning to the Milford Conference (which I loved) with a story I felt certain was good. Ten or twenty miles from Milford, Pennsylvania, I topped a hill and saw yellow dots in the road. They were goldfinches, and as my new car drew nearer they flew up, a golden shower rising from the earth. There are no words to describe how happy I was at that moment, when I felt that a whole new life was opening before me. It was perfectly true. One was.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe

“Iknow an old couple who live near Hell.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe

“He was made all of copper, so he was coppery-red all over, like a new pipe for the bathroom.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe

“Work in the kitchen of the inn had provided her with many opportunities to snatch a mouthful of pastry or a choice potato dumpling or a half stein of dark beer, and she had availed herself of most of them—with the result that she possessed a lush and blooming figure of the sort that appeals to men like Lame Hans,”
― Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe

“the street still so hot that the dogs would not bark for fear of fainting,”
― Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe

“The center desk drawer held a dead insect, a penknife with yellowed imitation ivory sides and a broken blade, a drawing of a bracket”
― Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe

“They were functioning, Nicholas. They bought and sold; they worked, and paid their taxes—”
― Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe

“It was a long sentence for a monkey.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe

“Some are haunted by ghosts. I am haunted by stories.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction

“Spring surprised me, as she always does those of us who remain most of our lives indoors”
― Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe

“Of the nature of Death and the Dead we may enumerate twelve kinds. First there are those who become new gods, for whom new universes are born. Second those who praise. Third those who fight as soldiers in the unending war with evil. Fourth those who amuse themselves among flowers and sweet springs with sports. Fifth those who dwell in gardens of bliss, or are tortured. Sixth those who continue as in life. Seventh those who turn the wheel of the universe. Eighth those who find in their graves their mothers' wombs and in one life circle forever. Ninth ghosts. Tenth those born again as men in their grandsons' time. Eleventh those who return as beasts or trees. And last those who sleep.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction

“He wandered in the high, hot lands where men have few laws and many slaves.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe

“that’s something I didn’t understand until recently: you don’t get that degree; it gets you.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe

“A child, not knowing what is extraordinary and what commonplace, usually lights midway between the two, finds interest in incidents adults consider beneath notice, and calmly accepts the most improbable occurrences.”
― Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction