Catholics From The United States

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"It will come as no surprise to those of you in the book trade when I say that although books do not cause cancer, books in general do not sell as well as cigarettes."

"Here in two flat sentences are the best things I can say about our field on American television: Dr. Who is sometimes aired. Sometimes Battlestar Galactica is not."

"The Falklands War continues to fascinate me. What a conflict! What an unlikely pair of antagonists! The British have always fought, to be sure. No nation on Earth can be taken seriously in historical circles unless it has had at least one war with the British; it's like not having an American Express card. And yet the very idea of Britain in a contemporary war is a shock. Britain, one feels, fights in history books and not on TV."

"If those who despise us stone us as prophets, they must listen to us as prophets. If they curse us as sorcerers, they must learn to curse from us, as sorcerers. Let us enlighten the young, and let us be condemned for corrupting the young, like Socrates. Let us awaken the old before they sleep forever, though they must read us in secret like the Kabbalah. [...] The difficulties and successes of our books and magazines, and the rejection and misinterpretation of the films made from our ideas—are the flounderings of the human mind upon the Paleozoic shore. We are the sand in its gills; let's not lose our grit."

"Most Christians know next to nothing about the life and teachings of Christ and are afraid to learn, sensing that the knowledge will upset their preconceptions."

"PARADOX: A statement that reduces the matter at hand to complete obscurity while clarifying it. [...] Paradoxes are sensitive and can be routed by sneering."

"This, then, is the new illiteracy, the illiteracy of those who can read but don't. [...] This new illiteracy is more pernicious than the old, because unlike the old illiteracy it does not debar its victims from power and influence, although like the old illiteracy it disqualifies them for it. Those long-dead men and women who learned to read so that they might read the Bible and John Bunyan would tell us that pride is the greatest of all sins, the father of sin. And the victims of the new illiteracy are proud of it. If you don't believe me, talk to them and see with what pride they trumpet their utter ignorance of any book you care to name."

"I have called these animals destriers, borrowing an old word for war-horses. I've given them clawed feet instead of hoofs because I think the genetic engineers will give them claws too. The horse's hoofs seem to be an evolutionary mistake. To speak in Lamarckian terms, the horse has lengthened its legs by standing on its toes until it has ended up standing on one toenail. [...] Cheetahs, wolves, and greyhounds all have nonretractile claws that serve them as their spikes serve runners and baseball players. Racehorses could not run as fast as they do if they did not wear aluminum or magnesium shoes."

"Just as mainstream literature shows us how our contemporaries view the present, and historical fiction shows us how they view the past (not, of course, what the present or the past were actually like), so speculative fiction shows us how they view the future. I happen to believe that my contemporaries' view of the past is not very important; but their view of the present is quite definitely important, and their view of the future is vital."

"My definition of a great story has nothing to do with "a varied and interesting background." It is: One that can be read with pleasure by a cultivated reader and reread with increasing pleasure. The business about a varied and interesting background belongs to my definition of a good story."

"If you rob someone who would help you if you needed help you only rob yourself. [...] Do you imagine you can be cruel without teaching others to be cruel to you?"

"Does anyone know an effective way of keeping rabbits out of a garden that does not involve building a fence? I have tried that already, but the rabbit will not sit still long enough for me to get the fence all the way around him."

"We don't harm the gods when we mingle their names with our curses and obscenities. We harm ourselves. I said that I didn't regard most gods as holy, but they don't have to be for our malice and mockery to recoil upon ourselves."

"The slight criticism of evolution I offer should not be taken as evidence that I do not believe in evolution; I do. Let's not blame God for everything. I also believe in Lamarckism, as it was put forward by Lamarck. (The Lamarckism presented in standard textbooks is actually Lysenkoism, a straw man set up by the opponents of Lamarckism, palpably false and easily disproved.) There is no paradox in that: Lamarckism and Darwinism are not mutually exclusive, except politically."

"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."

"You have a walking stick. Suppose it could walk by itself, and that it chose to walk away from you. [...] It would no longer be a walking stick at all, only a stick that walked."

"Experience is a wonderful teacher, but one whose lessons come too late."

"We're going to fight to the end. But it's better if you fight to somebody else's end."

"It is well not to spend one's symbols improvidently."

"Whenever a man and a woman come to words or blows, fools are quick to attribute it to the differences between the sexes. The sexes differ much less than they wish to believe, and such differences as are real tend less to promote strife than to prevent 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."

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

"Adolescents are simply those people who haven't as yet chosen between childhood and adulthood. For as long as anyone tries to hold on to the advantages of childhood—the freedom from responsibility, principally—while seeking to lay claim to the best parts of adulthood, such as independence, he is an adolescent. [...] Eventually most people choose to be adults, or are forced into it. A very few retreat into childhood and never leave it again. A large number remain adolescents for life."

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

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

"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."

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

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

"Do you know the story about the farmer who complained all his life about getting too much rain or too little, about the soil and the winds and so on? [...] The farmer died and went to Mainframe, and was soon called to the magnificent chamber in which Pas holds court. Pas said to him, "I understand you feel that I botched certain aspects of the job when I built the Whorl; and the farmer admitted it was so, saying, "Well, sir, pretty often I thought I could have made it better." To which Pas replied, "Yes, that's what I wanted you to do.""

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."