"You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing."
"Women believe -- or at least often pretend to believe -- that all our tenderness for them springs from desire; that we love them when we have not for a time enjoyed them, and dismiss them when we are sated, or to express it more precisely, exhausted. There is no truth in this idea, though it may be made to appear true. When we are rigid with desire, we are apt to pretend a great tenderness in the hope of satisfying that desire; but at no other time are we in fact so liable to treat women brutally, and so unlikely to feel any deep emotion but one."
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Source: Gene Wolfe (1994). “Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'”, p.372, Macmillan
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"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."