Samuel R. Delany quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Samuel R. Delany on Wise Famous Quotes.

I was a kid who liked art and theater and dance and music, but if you lived in Harlem, high culture was somewhere else, and it wasn't black.

An artist simply cannot trust any public emblem of merit.

As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.

The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.

There is a sense of decency that's like a barometer to a man's or a country's health.

Topologically, men and women are identical. Some things are just larger and more developed in one than the other and positioned differently.

I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.

To live within the tethers of desire is - again and again - to be shocked at how far they have come loose from reason

It's frightening for one artist to see another one, any other one turn away from art.

Rydra, when I look at the night and stars, it is only a passive act, but you are active even watching, and halo the stars with more luminous flame.

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 artist's

Wind passed again; the iris shuddered about the diamond chip.

He laughed. So you see, I'm not a nut. Not a real one, anyway. I haven't been a real nut in a long time.

Things have made you what you are," she recited "What you are will make you what you will become.

All life is a rhythm," she said as I sat up. "All death is a rhythm suspended, a syncopation before life
resumes.

The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.

She cut through worlds, and joined them - that's the important part - so that both became bigger.

I do not say, however, that every delusion or wandering of the mind should be called madness. Erasmus of Rotterdam, The Praise of Folly There

Pain ... after you've lived with it long enough, isn't pain anymore. It's something else.

Bear in mind that the novel
no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective
is always an historical projection of its own time.

They were nice in a useless sort of way, which is, after all, the only way to be truly nice.

I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently.

If you are to stay in the good graces of the powerful, you had best, however unobtrusively, please the servants of the powerful.

Most people here have spent most of their time someplace else. You learn

From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.

To the extent that the short story is an art, Sturgeon is the American short-story writer.

In the cups, one after another, glistening disks rose, black without translucence.

Bellona used to be a pretty good town.

I heard Bellona was where it was at. It must be, now. I'm here.

Down, everybody! Down on all fours! We're going to show you our new step! Like this: just swing your up and -

The strange machinery by which a reputation precedes its source we all know is faulty. Yet how much faith we put in it!

Breathing is a fascinating thing to watch in a woman.

It's only ... when we're stripped of purpose that we know who we are.

I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on.

If people are busy living out myths you don't like, leave them to it.

Reality must prove itself again and again to questioners ... it is the fantasy which goes on without contradiction, without having to prove itself.

You give me so much pleasure, why should I ever want to hurt you?

The mark of the truly civilized is their (truly baffling to the likes of you and me) patience with what truly baffles.

Everything in a science-fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts).

Suggestion is a literary strategy.

You can be bored with anything if you try hard enough.

Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.

It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.

The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts , but that it generates a way of thinking.

Bitch, on that world, was what men called women they were extremely fond of or extremely displeased with when the woman was not there.

Don't go chattering to the stars if you're going to do it with your eyes closed.

Honesty is the best policy ; a policy is, after all, a strategy for living in the polis in the city ...

The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear.

You are trapped in that bright moment where you learned your doom

In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.

He shrugged. Confusion was like struggling to find the proper way to sit inside his skin.

This parched evening seasons the night with remembrances of rain.

Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes.

Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep.

If you are angle, I am complement. If you are circle, I am circumscribed.

Do you follow the wrestling? Most people think it's illegal, but you can watch it there. Ruby and Python are on display this evening.

I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.

The truth is always multiplex.

You do not need an identity to become yourself; you need an identity to become -like- someone else.

'Dhalgren' is the kind of book in which you can look for pretty much anything you want. I tried to put as much into it as I could at the time.

Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not.

He wanted to talk and had nothing to say.

The rich are always enamored of the ancient.

Spending practically every minute of your day on pure survival is an absolutely boring life.

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.

It's easy to repeat; it's hard to speak,

Jo, you're you. And that's as important as you want to make it.

Presumptuous bastard,' Tak said. 'Sunset? He might at least wait and see if there's a tomorrow morning.

Ambition like a liquid ruby stains.

So howled out for the world to give him a name.
The indark answered with wind.

Human beings being what they are, order spreads, given half a chance, almost as fast as confusion.

It is not that I have no past. Rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now.

Will sex between humans ever lose its endlessly repeated history?

The dawn of space travel is the dawn of woman.