Quotes from Samuel R. Delany

And his left nipple was centimetres above my right eye. I wanted to lean my head back and lick it – not from desire but from that idiocy always there to subvert desire and render it ludicrous. Our human heat was a third creature bevelling between us.

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

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

Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind — vividly, forcefully — that good writing, which stops with clarity and logic, doesn't.

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

Ah, well, during the Middle Ages, religion was often able to redeem art. Today, however, art is about the only thing that can redeem religion, and the clerics will never forgive us that.

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

I pass beneath a fixed white line of trees where dry leaves lie for footsteps to dismember. They crackle with a muted sound like fear. That and the wind are all that I can hear. I ask cold air, "What is the word that frees?" The wind says, "Change," and the white sun, "Remember.

I also believe that the most meaningful change, where individuals can triumph over both entropy and evolution as it were, comes when people use empirical knowledge against good taste, use strength against power, skill against art, and technology against science in their easiest and unthinking modes.

Lots of people do things lots better than lots of others; but, today, so many people do so many things very well, and so many people are seriously interested in so many different things people do for their own different reasons, you can't call any thing the best for every person, or even every serious person. So you just pay real attention to the real things that affect you; and don't waste your time knocking the rest.

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

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

What does it … feel like, to have lost an entire world?' 'Lonely.' Rat raised his many-ringed hand to rub at his neck under his broad jaw. 'But the loneliness comes from the question.

The father-mother-son that makes up the basic family unit, at least as the Family has described it for centuries now, represents a power structure, a structure of strong powers, mediating powers, and subordinate powers, as well as paths for power developments and power restrictions.

All the misunderstandings that tie the world up and keep people apart were quivering before me at once, waiting for me to untangle them, explain them, and I couldn't. I didn't know the words, the grammar, the syntax.

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

An individual, a thing apart from its environment, and apart from all things in that environment; an individual was a type of thing for which symbols were inadequate, and so names were invented . I am invented. I am not a round warm blue room. I am someone in that room; I am—

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

That seemed to be, if anything, the power of writing—to hold sway over memory, making it public, keeping it private, possibly, even, keeping it secret from oneself—

Oh, the bright young people who come here, with their bright, lively imaginations. They do nothing all day long but think of ways to kill. It's a terribly placid society, really. But, why shouldn't it be? All its aggressions are vented from nine to five. Still, I think it does something to our minds. Imagination should be used for something other than pondering murder, don't you think?

If the situation of a technological society was such that there could be no direct relation between a man's work and his modus vivendi, other than money, at least he must feel that he is directly changing things by his work, shaping things, making things that weren't there before, moving things from one place to another. He must exert energy in his work and see these changes occur with his own eyes. Otherwise he would feel his life was futile.

No laws: to break, or to follow. Do anything you want. Which does funny things to you. Very quickly, surprisingly quickly, you become-" [...] "exactly who you are.

What we need is not so much radical writers as we need radical readers!

The yellow eyes had fallen from the tired star. Lorq's face erupted about the scar at some antic from the Mouse that Katin had missed. Rage, Katin pondered. Rage. Yes, he is laughing. But how is anyone supposed to distinguish between laughter and rage in that face? But the others were laughing too. Yet some way, somehow, we do.