Samuel R. Delany Quotes

41 quotes in 820 categories

• Clouds out of control decoct anticipation. What use can any of us have for two moons? The miracle of order has run out and I…
• Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not.
• Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who…
• I read The NAMBLA Bulletin fairly regularly and I think it is one of the most intelligent discussions of sexuality I've ever found...I would have…
• Suggestion is a literary strategy.
• Science fiction doesn’t try to predict the future, but rather offers a significant distortion of the present…We sit around and look at what we see…
• It’s a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator’s experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the…
• It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.
• What you are will make you what you will become.
• The pulp hero, though he may be a renegade, is a guy who doesn't feel. Anything. Ever. And for the adolescent male - pummeled by…
• From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.
• I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently.
• I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.
• Linguistics is very much a science. It's a human science, one of the human sciences. And it's one of the more interesting human sciences.
• A number of things in 'Dhalgren' are just meant to function as mysteries. They're mysteries when the book begins, and they're mysteries when the book…
• All too often, when creative people pick out someone else's creative work as an inspiration, what they end up with is very, very far from…
• How we treat our invalids - our mad, our physically or mentally compromised family members - does tell you something about who we are politically,…
• I think a 23-page ordinary comic is an investment for the artist, but if you're doing something 60 to 104 pages, that's a really big…
• I want to read about a character doing something fairly quiet where I can picture who the character is, and what their attitude towards the…
• The idea that certain things in life - and in the universe - don't yield up their secrets is something that requires a slightly more…

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