"You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing."
"It may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual."
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Source: Gene Wolfe (1994). “Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'”, p.70, Macmillan
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More quotes by Gene Wolfe
"Imagine a man who stands before a mirror; a stone strikes it, and it falls to ruin all in an instant. And the man learns that he is himself, and not the mirrored man he had believed himself to be."
"People don't want other people to be people."
"Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real."
"Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them. We believe we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges."
"Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard."