Fantasy Authors

"Nobody bothers crazy people. [...] In the end, maybe it's the crazy people who win after all."

"In the marketplace he told of honor, and how it is a higher law than any law. At the crossroads he talked of freedom, the freedom of the wind and clouds, and freedom that loves all things and is without guilt. Beside the city gates he told stories of the forgotten cities that were and of the forgotten cities that might be, if only men would forget them."

"The only actors who can really do justice to their parts are the ones who don't know what they are."

"We can dive to the bottom of the sea and some say NASA will fly us to the stars, and I have known men to plunge into the past—or the future—and drown. But there's one place where we can't go. We can't go where we are already. We can't go home, because our minds, and our hearts, and our immortal souls are already there."

"She often spoke of marryin' a butcher or a sausage maker, having a liking for those trades, as she said, for they knew you couldn't never get all the stains from their aprons, and didn't demand it."

"Time passed, slipping through the waist of the universe's great hourglass like the eroded soil of this continent slipping down her rivers to the seas."

"An exaggerated and solemn respect always indicates a loss of faith."

"They based their extrapolations on numbers. That worked as long as money, which is easily measured numerically, was the principle motivating force in human affairs. But as time progressed, human actions became responsive instead to a multitude of incommensurable vectors."

"What I would like to know is what I should be doing." "I see what you mean," Freeling said, "but I'm afraid I can't tell you. If you were a lathe operator I'd say make that part, but you're a part of management, and you can't treat managerial people that way." "Go ahead," Forlesen told him. "I won't mind." [...] "What I meant was that if I knew what you ought to be doing I'd hire a clerk to do it. You're where you are because we feel—rightly or wrongly—that you can find your own work, recognize it when you see it, and do it or get somebody else to. Just make damn sure you don't step on anybody's toes while you're doing it, and don't make more trouble than you fix. [...] Don't come running to me with complaints, and don't let me get any complaints about you. Now what was it you wanted to see me about?" "I don't," Forlesen said. "You said you wanted to see me." "Oh. Well, I'm through."

"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."

"Evolution teaches us, Nicholas, that the original purpose of language was to ritualize men’s threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later."

"It will help her if she wants to be helped; if she insists on clasping her illness to her it will not."

"No man has a home unless he is master of a place where he must please no one—a place where he can go and lock the door behind him."

"“That the environment should respond to human thought. That is the core of magic and the oldest dream of mankind.”"

"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."

"Be at peace, my friend. One thing I have learnt about Death is that his bark is worse than his bite."

"No golden age to discover now," he whispered. "No end to disease and starvation. No, bright sparkling cities reaching the clouds ... All that I have lived for is gone now. I am so tired." "Then think on this, priest: You stopped the Eternal from finding greater weapons. Your actions here have led to her death. The world is free again." "Free? Of one tyrant perhaps. You think there will be no others?" "No, I do not. But I know there will always be men to stand against them. You grieve because of a pure magic lost. That magic was corrupted by evil. This is how evil thrives. We find an herb that cures disease, and someone will make a poison from it. We forge iron to make a better plow, and someone will make a sharper sword. There can be no power that evil will not corrupt."

"Winning is not everything, Stavut. Men like to think it is. Sometimes it is more important to stand against evil than to worry about beating it ... Evil will always have the worst weapons. Evil will gather the greatest armies. They will burn, and plunder, and kill. But that's not the worst of it. They will try to make us believe that the only way to destroy them is to become like them. That is the true vileness of evil. It is contagious."

"Plan for the worst, expect the best."

"It is a merchant's nature to quibble over coins. It is how we become rich and buy satin shirts. The problems of who governs this area is one for another day."

"All legends have a base in fact."

"A lovers' spat," he said. "You know how it is. Boy meets girl, girl wants boy dead. An everyday story, really."

"We like to think of life as a constant ... Yet it can be ended in a heartbeat.""

"We are closest to life when we are vying with death ... The blood runs hot, the air smells sweet, the sky becomes an unbearably beautiful blue. Battle is intoxicating. That is why the ghastly vileness of war has always been so popular."

"In my experience all women deserve someone better."

"It is the curse of absolute power, Olek. There is no one to admonish you, no laws save those you make. We like to believe there is something special, even alien, about evil. We like to think that tyrants are different from the rest of us. That they are somehow inhuman. They are not. They are merely unchained, unfettered; free to do as they please."

"We all of us carry the seed of evil in our hearts and souls ... Even the purest, even the most holy. It is part of the human condition, born in us. We cannot root it out. All that we can do — at best — is to prevent it from germinating."

"What I did understand from the rebirth process was that the rebirth reproduced a physical duplicate of the original. But this is my point. It is physical. What truly makes a man who he is? Is it the strength of his arms, or the courage of his soul? You have your own soul, Harad. You are not Druss. Live your own life."

"Why am I taking seduction advice from a man whose idea of foreplay is to slam coins on the table and shout: 'Who wants to ride the big horse?'" "Because he knows best, Tinker."

"Self-preservation is a paramount desire in all of us. Good and evil are interchangeable. When the wolves pull down a fawn I don't doubt the doe would consider it an evil act. For the wolves it is a necessity, and they would see the arrival of fresh meat as good."

"We are full of dreams [...] We long for the unattainable. We believe in the nonsense of fables. There is no pure love; there is lust and there is need."

"“Look around you - this [land] is cold, inhospitable. Only the strong survive. Here there are no green fields, no verdant pastures. A warrior is old by the time he is thirty. We have no energy to spend on pretty words.”"

"Never be glad that another man has died. Not ever. [...] It never ends. Never ... ever ... be glad to kill."

"A man can be aroused to anger as easily as he is aroused to rut. The two emotions are closely linked. Anger and lust. So the warrior is aroused in battle and fights to dominate."

"‘Win or lose, we achieve nothing in the world that we understand [...]’ ‘But then the world does not matter.’ ‘Indeed it does not [...] It is good to understand that.’"

"Evil will never be countered while good men do nothing."

"'Where will you go from here?' he asked. Chellin shrugged. 'Who knows? North again. Maybe not. I'm tired of this life, Kiall. I may head south, to Drenai land. Buy a farm, raise a family.' 'And have raiders descend on you to steal your daughters?' Chellin nodded and sighed. 'Yes. Like all dreams, it doesn't bear close examination [...]'"

"Every man has his own reason for every deed. Usually it is selfish."