quote:

NG: “Is feedback important to you? I thought the Washington Post article made some very sensible points. It said, ‘This is how good Gene Wolfe is, and this is why you haven’t heard of him.’ One point was that you make no effort in your fiction to be user-friendly.”
GW: “What would I do that I don’t do, if I were being user-friendly?”
NG: “It goes back to that line I’ve been using ever since I read it in a letter where you defined good literature: ‘My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.’ While ‘user-friendly’ may have been the wrong word, there is a level on which a lot of fiction these days is expected to give everything up first time to somebody, whether he knows something about the subject or not. You do not do that.”
GW: “Phooey! I don’t want to write that kind of thing. Rats! I don’t like it and it would bore me to write it and I’m not gonna write it. And besides, I don’t know everything to give it up. You’re going to see things in there that I don’t see consciously. I like those things.”
NG: “I take enormous pleasure in the fact that people are still arguing about the first four in the ‘Book of the New Sun’ sequence to this day. ‘Was the Autarch Severian’s mother?’ ‘Is the Clute theory valid?’ ‘Oh, we’ve got another Australian theory....’ You have these dueling theorists, pointing to the text and trying to second- and third- and outguess.”
GW: “Yeah, but the thing is, too often people want me to go in and settle their argument. That’s exactly what I should not do. I am dealing from this position of presumed expertise. We don’t have a level playing field. If Arthur Conan Doyle had gone in and settled all this ‘Holmes’ stuff, there would be no Baker Street Irregulars today, yet people have made whole hobbies out of being Baker Street Irregulars — why shouldn’t they? There’s no sacredness to the text.”

quote:

Pasicrates answered, "We give our might toLeonidas, just as might was offered to Patroklos. The winner will complete the sacrifice."
When we closed again, his strength was twice what it had been . For what seemed a whole night we strove together, but I could not throw him, nor could he throw me.
There came a moment when my face was to the fire, and he met my gaze. The lion roared again, nearer now, and loud as a war horn over the shouting of the men from Rope. Pasicrates stiffened. "There's a lion in your eyes," he gasped.
"And a boy in yours," I told him; and lifting him over my head, I carried him away from the altar until the waves licked at my ankles, and I cast him into the sea. The lion roared a third time. I have not heard it since.

quote:

It had been nearly a moth since the old bawdy-house piano had begun to repair him. It had found him in the barn in which it had lived in retirement for eighty years; and it had cottoned to him from the beginning, seeing in him a man in ruins, to be sure, yet a salvageable man and one well worth saving. I will make you whole, it had promised. Nor had that solemn promise been a falsification or an exaggeration, though the old pianowas capableof both and not unaccustomed to either-had not been unaccustomed to them, that is to say,many years ago when it had pursued an active career.

quote:

I shall not bore you with a catalog of her virtues and beauties; you would have to see her and hold her to judge her justly. Her bitter blade was an ell in length, straight and square-pointed as such a sword's should be. Man-edge and woman-edge could part a hair to within a span of the guard, which was of thick silver with a carven head at either end. Her grip was onyx bound with silver bands, two spans long and terminated with an opal. Art had been lavished on her; but it is the function of art to render attractive and significant those things that without it would not be so, and so art had nothing to give her. The words Terminus Est had been engraved upon her blade in curious and beautiful letters, and I had learned enough of ancient languages since leaving the Atrium of Time to know that they meant This is the Line of Division.