"[James B. Jordan]: At that time [of your conversion to Catholicism] what kind of theologians did you read, or did you read theology as such? [Gene Wolfe]: I didn’t read a lot of theology. I read some modern books of explications of Catholic theology for laymen and that sort of thing. I would like to be able to say I read St Thomas Aquinas in the Latin and so forth, but I didn’t. It would be a lie. I read some books of Thomistic theology and biographies of St Thomas Aquinas. JJ: Chesterton’s? GW: Yes, I read Chesterton’s book on St Thomas Aquinas. I discovered Chesterton and ended up reading everything of Chesterton’s that I could find. I had gone through very much the same thing earlier with C.S. Lewis. JJ: Ignatius Press is attempting to reprint all of Chesterton in a whole set. Are you collecting those? GW: That is right, so they are. In fact they have reprinted a lot of newspaper columns that I had not seen in my initial sweep through Chesterton when I read everything I could find. JJ: I imagine at that time it was hard to find. GW: It was fairly difficult to find. I have also since discovered that some of those newspaper columns, as I originally read them, had been heavily edited by someone other than Chesterton for book publication. I detest that sort of thing, particularly when there is no indication given in the book that it has been done, because you think that you are reading what Chesterton wrote for a newspaper in 1905, and in fact the history paragraphs have been changed almost out of recognition."
— "Gene Wolfe Interview" (1992), in Shadows of the New Sun
