235 Quotes by Gene Wolfe

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

I have a bird. Inside.” She patted the flat stomach below her small breasts, and for a moment Nicholas thought she had really found food. “She sits in here. She has tangled a nest in my entrails, where she sits and tears at my breath with her beak. I look healthy to you, don’t I? But inside I’m hollow and rotten and turning brown, dirt and old feathers, oozing away. Her beak will break through soon.

If we could have our way, no man would have to go roving or draw blood. But women did not make the world. All of you are torturers, one way or another.

You’re a materialist, like all ignorant people. But your materialism doesn’t make materialism true. Don’t you know that? In the final summing up, it is spirit and dream, thought and love and act that matter.

For no man lives long when his dreams are dead.

One can’t found a novel theology on Nothing, and nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction.

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.

If a man bullies a woman, all the women turn against him. Then the other men mock him because he sleeps alone.

Do not start a story unless you have an ending in mind. You can change the story’s ending if you wish, but you should always have a destination.