Samuel R. Delany Quotes

93 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Samuel R. Delany
As morning branded the sea, darkness fell away at the far side of the beach. I turned to follow it.

Samuel R. Delany
I want to know but I can't see are you up there. I don't have a lot of strength now. The sky is stripped. I am too weak to write much. But I still hear them walking in the trees; not speaking. Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to

Samuel R. Delany
I was born, the Mouse said. I must die. I am suffering. Help me. There, I just wrote your book for you.

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

Samuel R. Delany
Finally I just had to get out. Because when that fantasy seeps into the reality, she just becomes an incredibly ugly person. She feels she can distort anything that occurs for whatever purpose she wants. Whatever she feels, that's what is, as far as she's concerned.

Samuel R. Delany
You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can't express, and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn't hurt any more: that's my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.

Samuel R. Delany
A lesson which history should have taught us thousands of years ago was finally driven home. No man can wield absolute power over other men and still retain his own mind. For no matter how good his intentions are when he takes up the power, his alternate reason is that freedom, the freedom of other people and ultimately his own, terrifies him. Only a man afraid of freedom would want this power, who could conceive of wielding it. And that fear of freedom will turn him into a slave of this power.

Samuel R. Delany
Bear in mind that the novel—no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective—is always a historical projection of its own time.

Samuel R. Delany
Sometimes you want to say things, and you're missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That's how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn't exist.

Samuel R. Delany
Like contemporary poetry, philosophy is one of those things, especially at the beginning stages, most people would rather do than study — which is why most of what gets done is so impoverished.

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

Samuel R. Delany
Men hate bitches the way white men hate niggers. … Long as they do like we say they're suppose to do, everything always looks fine. But let one of them get even a little, teeny, weeny bit out of line, then you watch what happens — we wanna kill. We may not kill, but we wanna kill. Well, if I was a bitch and knew what I know 'cause I ain't one, I'd get out there and start killin' first.

Samuel R. Delany
There are three types of actions: purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters, to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three.

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

Samuel R. Delany
It is not that love sometimes makes mistakes, but that it is, essentially, a mistake. We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfections on to another person. One day the phantasmagoria vanishes, and with it love dies.

Samuel R. Delany
Perhaps it's good you're not going to write anymore: you'd have to start considering all those dull things like your relation to your audience, the relation between your personality and your poetry, the relation between your poetry and all the poetry before it.

Samuel R. Delany
You're living in the real world now, Spider said sadly. It's come from something. It's going to something. Myths always lie in the most difficult places to ignore.

Samuel R. Delany
Ah ha! the Spike said. I think we have just gotten down to a gritty—or at least a nitty.

Samuel R. Delany
It is a magic book. Words mean things. When you put them together they speak. Yes, sometimes they flatten out and nothing they say is real, and that is one kind of magic. But sometimes a vision will rip up from them and shriek and clank wings clear as the sweat smudge on the paper under your thumb. And that is another kind.

Samuel R. Delany
You seem to be using some sort of logical system where when you get near any explanation, you say: By definition my problem is insoluble. Now that explanation over there would solve it. But since I've defined my problem as insoluble, then by definition that solution doesn't apply.

Samuel R. Delany
What I look for in a friend is someone who's different from me. The more different the person is, the more I'll learn from him. The more he'll come up with surprising takes on ideas and things and situations.

Samuel R. Delany
Imagination should be used for something other than pondering murder, don't you think?

Samuel R. Delany
At a certain point I came to the conclusion that one of the murderous aspects of the AIDS crisis was that people were used to not talking about sexual experiences in detail. Gay sex for instance does not cause AIDS. There are certain acts that transmit a virus and there are certain other acts that don't transmit a virus. If you don't talk about what goes on in sexuality, so that you know what particular acts you're dealing with, then I think you're, possibly in an indirect way but never-the-less in a very real way, contributing to an atmosphere of ignorance which the result is people die.

Samuel R. Delany
What do you see, Captain?
Two boys with hands locked for a fight. You see how one is light and the other is dark? I see love against death, light against darkness, chaos against order. I see the clash of all opposites under... the sun. I see Prince and myself.
Which is which?
I don't know, Mouse.

Samuel R. Delany
And who's to say where life ceases and theater begins—

Samuel R. Delany
Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind—vividly, forcefully...

Samuel R. Delany
Suppose I was researching, not the life of some genius philosopher with his books and articles and a wake of articulate friends and acquaintances, but rather, a homeless kid in and out of mental hospitals for chronic masturbation and indecent exposure?... How would I even start?

Samuel R. Delany
Yeah, nigger, you better grin. Niggers can't smile in this book.

Samuel R. Delany