Samuel R. Delany - Babel-17 (1966)

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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

I saw a bunch of the weirdest, oddest people I have ever met in my life, who thought different, and acted different, and even made love different. And they made me laugh, and get angry, and be happy, and be sad, and excited, and even fall in love a little.... And they didn't seem to be so weird or strange anymore.

Samuel R. Delany

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

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

We have to name ourselves first. And you don't know who you are.

Samuel R. Delany