"Wolfe writes theology when he writes SF (he's Catholic, you know). I find some of his stories very restrictive because of this, but he does convey this sense of wonder beautifully."

"Gene Wolfe is a religious Republican, but his tragico-Catholic perspective leads to a deeply unglamorized and unsanitized awareness of social reality."

"I no longer believe first-rate science fiction can be categorized as genre fiction at all. Take Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. He calls it "science fantasy." Is it science fiction? Is it fantasy? Who cares? It is a great novel."

"only snobbery or ignorance apologizes for liking science fiction anymore, with writers like Philip K. Dick and Gene Wolfe around."

"I'm getting awfully choosy in my science fiction reading at this point; I have read too much. It's not science fiction's fault, it's my fault. I've O.D.'d on it. I'm full up. I know all the plots. But there are some writers I can read without question and with pleasure and joy, like Vonda McIntyre. Or Gene Wolfe. ... I think Gene is one of the major novelists of the eighties. He's working on a trilogy which is going to be called The Book of the New Sun. I think we have something inexhaustible being written under our very eyes."

"Reading Gene Wolfe is dangerous work. It's a knife-throwing act, and like all good knife-throwing acts, you may lose fingers, toes, earlobes or eyes in the process. Gene doesn't mind. Gene is throwing the knives."

"Animals in zoos (we are told) believe that their bars protect them. We Americans have forged our own bars, built our own cage, and live in it more or less content as long as someone feeds us."

"Every so often I get optimistic and explain the best method of learning to write for students. I don't believe any of them has ever tried it."

"Some are haunted by ghosts. I am haunted by stories."

"Almost any interesting work of art comes close to saying the opposite of what it really says."

"The true dawn of adulthood, of intellectual maturity, if you like, is the realization that adults are all fools."

"We may be damned at last, by God or our consciences; and though I've met a good many people who profess to credit no God, I've never met one who believed he had no conscience—this though he could no more produce it for my inspection than I could point out the God he demanded to see."

"The same critics who spend hundreds of pages discussing various peculiarities of the author's supposed nature often devote none to that much more significant person, the reader for whom he wrote. [...] It is a failure that disqualifies a great deal of head-scratching and hypothesizing. It amounts to saying that the letter is more important than its recipient, the signal more important than the changing image created from it, the bait more important than the fish."

"Paradoxes explain everything. Since they do, they cannot be explained."

"Be careful about extending credit, too, and doubly careful about refusing to extend it."

"Perhaps I need to begin before I can think clearly about the task. The chief thing is to begin, after all—after which the chief thing is to finish."

"When neither our fellows nor our gods spoil our plans, we spoil them ourselves."

"He is not mad. He is only more clever than you. It is not the same."

"A trooper fights for honor ... or from loyalty. Or for loot sometimes. But he waits for pay. He will not wait without it, because when there is no fighting there is no honor to win, no flag to die for, no loot to gain."

"There are people who love birds so much they free them. There are others who love them so much they cage them."

"What little I have learned in the course of a long life, regarding the gods, I have tried to forget."

"The jokes of the gods are long in the telling."

"When we're young, we notice things that are young, like ourselves. New grass on old graves. New leaves on old trees"

"Everyone who is grieved at anything, or discontented, is like a pig for sacrifice, kicking and squealing. Like a dove for sacrifice is he who laments in silence. Our one distinction is that it is given to us to consent, if we will, to the necessity imposed upon us."

"There is more to be learned from any good teacher than the subject taught."

"Action, you see, is the end that thought achieves. Action is its only purpose. What else is it good for? If we don't act, it's worthless."

"As you intend to live hereafter, it is in your power to live here."

"The best way to be thought honest is to be honest."

"Any representation of a god is ultimately a lie, Silk explained. It may be a convenient lie, and it may even be a reverent one; but it's ultimately false. ... Neither image would be more nearly true than the other, or more true than any other—merely more appropriate."

"You have need of learning, children, in order that the whorl will someday have need of you."

"The gods smile on us, my son, or so it is written. It's a wonder they don't laugh aloud."

"Men build scales, but the gods blow upon the lighter pan."

"“We can only hope.” “That’s like the frog said when he seen the stork.”"

"We never really got married. When we both wanted to we never had the money, somehow. And when we had the money, there was always some kind of quarrel. After a couple of years everybody thought we were married anyway."

"He is indeed a creature of evil; but so are you, and so am I."

"What is perceived is dictated by the instrument. If you had other eyes, or another mind, you would see all things otherwise."

"It’s easy—very easy—to slay a ruler. But it’s very difficult to prevent a worse one from coming to his place."

"“You’re called a holy man,” she said. “I see you’re wholly deranged.”"

"Until we reach the end of time, we don’t know whether something’s been good or bad; we can only judge the intentions of those who acted."

"“Yours is a race of pawns,” Tzadkiel told me. “You move forward only, unless we move you back to begin the game again. But not all the pieces on the board are pawns.”"

"“I pledged myself to show you wonders.” I drew her farther from the building. “I’m not ready to see wonders. Yours, or any other woman’s.”"

"Those who have never fought suppose that the deserter who flies the field is consumed by shame. He is not, or he would not desert; with only trifling exceptions, battles are fought by cowards afraid to run."

"The most trivial skirmish is not trivial to those who die in it, and so should not be trivial in any ultimate sense to us."

"I was the core of the universe, as we always are to ourselves."

"“You’re a poet too, aren’t you? And a good liar, I bet.” “I was the Autarch of Urth; that required a little lying, if you like. We called it diplomacy.”"

"Now I must, I suppose, explain why I have been writing this account. [...] I have written to disclose myself to myself, and I am writing now because I will, I know, sometime read what I am now writing and wonder. Perhaps by the time I do, I will have solved the mystery of myself, or perhaps I will no longer care to know the solution."

"One of the questions whose answers we seek is why we seek."

"It doesn't move because he has fastened it in place until he finds out why it doesn't move."