It’s always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks.
“Everything may be confusing but that is how things are. It is not true that you can’t get through the confusion and figure out certain things that are happening. Life seem superficially has very little pattern to it. There is a lot of confusion and so forth. That doesn’t mean that you can’t learn some things about it and see things in it if you are willing to look at what is going on and think about what is going on. It seems to me this is a puzzle that we are all set.”
Gene Wolfe