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Gene Wolfe Biography

Gene Rodman Wolfe (born May 7, 1931) is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He is noted for his dense, allusive prose as well as the strong influence of his Catholic faith. He is a prolific short-story writer and novelist and has won many science fiction and fantasy literary awards.

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Gene Wolfe Quotes

Before you ask more questions, think about whether you really want to know the answers.

Answers, Know, Think, Thinking, Want

A youthful American voice isn't particularly challenging - I've been a young American, and they're all around me. I can walk from my house to Barrington High School.

School, Voice, House, Young, Particularly

Year followed struggling year for me, and all that time I read - I suppose few have ever read so. I began, as most young people do, by reading the books I enjoyed. But I found that narrowed my pleasure.

Book, Narrowed, Reading, Struggle, Suppose, Young

Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.

Let, Short, Situations, Stories, Two, Writing

You do not characterize by telling the reader about the character. You do it by showing the character thinking, speaking and acting in a characteristic way. You simply show it and shut up.

Character, Characteristic, Showing, Thinking, Writing

My whole life experience feeds into my writing. I think that must be true for every writer. Clearly the Army and combat were major influences; just the same, you need to understand that many of the writers we have now couldn't load a revolver.

Army, Revolver, Same, Thinking, Writers, Writing

You must know the story of how the race of ancient days reached the stars, and how they bargained away all the wild half of themselves to do so, so that they no longer cared for the taste of the pale wind, no for love or lust, nor to make new songs nor to sing old ones, nor for any of the other animal things they believed they had brought with them out of the rain forests al the bottom of time--though in fact, so my uncle told me, those things brought them

Bottom, Old, Song, Stars, Things, Uncles

Ambiguity is necessary in some of my stories, not in all. In those, it certainly contributes to the richness of the story. I doubt that thematic closure is never attainable.

Attainable, Closure, Contributes, Doubt, Stories

. . . I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me

Flaws, Made, Real, Rejoiced

The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death.

Alas, Authorities, Love, Mean, Sex, Taught

There's a certain kind of lonely man who rejects love, because he believes that anyone who offers it wouldn't be a lover worth having.

Believe, Lonely, Love, Men, Rejects

We only have one dog now. Calamity Jane had to be put down. She was very old, and her medicine no longer controlled her seizures. Dilly is five now, I think. He's a neutered American Pit Bull Terrier, very gentle, about the color of buckskin.

Calamity, Color, Dog, Down, Pit, Thinking

Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past.

Long, Men, Past, Spring, Stupefied, Wine

Then I could not help wondering what the watching gods thought of us, with our clever masks and our jokes. What we think of crickets, perhaps, whose singing we hear with pleasure, though some of us smash them with our heels when they venture into sight.

Clever, Help, Masks, Sight, Thinking, Thought

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

Learn, Novel, Write, Writing

What a man knows hardly matters. It is what he does.

Doe, Knows, Man, Matter, Matters, Men

He's not rewarding us by talking to us. He's talking to us because He has something to say to us directly, as opposed to the things He says to all humanity.

Talking, Humanity, Opposed, Says

All of us. . . when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak.

Believe, Thinking, Talking, Intimately, Person

So powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us.

Charm, Destroy, Entities, Passion, Passions, Powerful

Imagine a man who stands before a mirror; a stone strikes it, and it falls to ruin all in an instant. And the man learns that he is himself, and not the mirrored man he had believed himself to be.

Fall, Imagine, Instant, Men, Mirrors, Ruin

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