Quotes from Samuel R. Delany

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

The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectators experience should be identical to, or have anything to do with, the artist's. That idea comes from an over-industrialized society which has learned to distrust magic.

Life is a very terrible thing, mostly, with points of wonder and beauty. Most of what makes it terrible, though, is simply that there's so much of it, blaring in through the five senses.

We try to bring up our children so that they are protected from the world's evils, only to find we've raised a pack of innocents who seem to be about to stumble into them at every turn just from sheer stupidity!

There are times when you must walk by yourself because it hurts so much to be alone.

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

I think of myself as someone who thinks largely through writing. Thus I write more than most people, and I write in many different forms. I think of myself as the kind of person who writes, rather than as one kind of writer or another.

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.

My family trained me to be polite to people I had just met, and that included strangers. You speak when you're spoken to. You look people in the eye when they address you and when you address them back.

The truth is always multiplex.

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 ends.

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

I'm not about either entertaining or instructing. The entertaining and instructing are secondary fallout from the fundamental thing, which is basically to create an aesthetic object.

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

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 are oppressed, because if they're going to change the world we live in, they - and all of us - have to be able to think about a world that works differently.

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

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.

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 the original.

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

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

How we treat our invalids - our mad, our physically or mentally compromised family members - does tell you something about who we are politically, historically, culturally.

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