Gene Wolfe

ESTJ

QUOTES

 * "The only way I know to write is to write the kind of thing I would like to read myself, and when I do that it usually ends up being classified as SF or "science fantasy", which is what I call most of my work."
 * "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. I've crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific on ships. I've crewed on a sailboat. I've ridden a lot of horses and one camel -- his name was Tank, and we loped across the Australian desert. I've flown in a light plane and a helicopter. (As a passenger. I'm not a pilot.) I've boxed, though not professionally. And so on and so forth."
 * [On what he enjoys about writing]: "Primarily revision. I like to polish and tidy up, like trying to make good stuff great.  First drafts are work. Are fighting, really. I know where I'm  going, but I know too that I mustn't get there too fast. What happens on the way? How to make the  reader see, smell, hear, and feel it?"
 * "I'm not nearly as good a writer at e-mail as I am on paper. I'm an old-fashioned guy. I need time to print it out and look at it and revise, scratch my head, pencil out words and pencil in words. The computer drives me nuts. I always remind people who talk about how writing is going to be revolutionized by the computer that Shakespeare wrote with a feather that he had to resharpen every page or so, and look what he did!"
 * [on fiction]: "The most important thing is that it assures the reader that things need not be as they are now. In other words, the most important thing is hope."
 * "America is in trouble (as it always is). The chief problem is that it is ruled by an elite that is out of touch with the mass of the governed. It's a fairly recent problem, and will be fixed in one way or another. America is still the greatest nation on Earth."
 * Nick Gevers: "When I interviewed Gene Wolfe by e-mail in January 2002, I came to the conversation aware that Wolfe the person is not unlike his books: genial (of course), accommodating, plain-spoken at times to a surprising degree; and yet a magician, a poser of paradoxes that, however simple on the surface, are in fact like the Labyrinth at Knossos, the mazes so many of his characters tread, as enormously involved and logically convoluted as reality itself. One cannot expect direct answers, at least about his books: they will speak for themselves, or not at all, and any candour is deceiving."
 * Peter Bebergal: "His narrators may be prophets, or liars, or merely crazy, but somewhere in their stories they help to reveal what Wolfe most wants his readers to know: that compassion can withstand the most brutal of futures and exist on the most distant planets, and it has been part of us since ages long past."
 * Neil Gaiman: "I once read him an account of a baffling murder, committed ninety years ago. "Oh," he said, "well, that's obvious," and proceeded off-handedly to offer a simple and likely explanation for both the murder and the clues the police were at a loss to explain. He has an engineer's mind that takes things apart to see how they work and then puts them back together."
 * "Almost any interesting work of art comes close to saying the opposite of what it really says."
 * "Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.”
 * “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.”
 * "People seem to look at mine and expect to find hidden fingerprints under the lily pad or something. I've heard some really nutty theories about my stories — I won't name names, but there's some real screwball stuff going on out there."