Quotes from Samuel R. Delany

Son, this whole town's my personal urinal. Makes me feel like I own it, pissin' all over the fuckin' thing.

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

Do you think a city can control the way the people live inside it? I mean, just the geography, the way the streets are laid out, the way the buildings are placed?

Where was the star? Take concepts like "distant," "isolate," "faint," and give them precise mathematical expression. They'll vanish under such articulation. But just before they do, that's where it lay. "My star." Lorq swept vanes aside so they could see. "That's my sun. That's my nova, with eight-hundred-year-old-light.

My political writers are likely to be my fellow science fiction writers.

Takin' care of that boy is the only thing I'm here for in this sea beaten world . . .

I saw a bunch of the weirdest, oddest people I had 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 myself." He glanced up at the sphere of the wrestling arena aloft in the bar. "And they didn't seem so weird or strange anymore.

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. And

Bellona used to be a pretty good town.

Shiftrunes?" "Letters that are pronounced one way on their first occurrence in a text, another on their second, another on their third, and so on in a fixed sequence. It gives the poet an interesting technique to exploit: she can have pairs of words that alliterate visually but not phonetically as well as pairs that alliterate phonetically but not visually. And she can play the two off against each other.

When a guy gets out and gets his face ground into the real world he comes up angry, wants to know how it works, and he'll believe anybody who tells him how, right or wrong.

Discipline that isn't self-discipline doesn't mean a thing to a boy.

I'm using "discourse" in an older sense: discourse as response, understanding, discourse as structure both conscious and unconscious: not dialogue, but what impels and structures dialogue: not the "discourse between …" but the "discourse of …

Some people's information is other people's misinformation and even disinformation. That is pretty much the contemporary condition.

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

Right now I'm just a bright guy with a lot to say and nothing to say it about.

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 anymore: that's my poem.

Who am I talking to other than myself here? Someone I hope who at least knows my languages.

Ron's muscles, she thought, were living cords that snapped and sang out their messages. On this man, muscles were shields to hold the world out, the man in. And something inside was leaping up again and again, striking the shield from behind.

Colors sluiced the air with fugal patterns as a shape subsumed the breeze and fell, to form further on, a brighter emerald, a duller amethyst. Odors flushed the wind with vinegar, snow, ocean, ginger, poppies, rum. Autumn, ocean, ginger, ocean, autumn; ocean, ocean, the surge of ocean again, while light foamed in the dimming blue that underlit the Mouse's face. Electric arpeggios of a neo-raga rilled.

Triumph was laughable and terrible and his.

She nodded. "In the ship, the pilot's nervous system is connected directly with the controls. The whole hyperstasis transit consists of him literally wrestling the stasis shifts. You judge by his reflexes, his ability to control his artificial body. An experienced Transporter can tell exactly how he'll work with hyperstasis currents.

Sometimes I cannot tell who wrote what. That is upsetting. With some sections, I can remember the place and time I wrote them, but have no memory of the incidents described. Similarly, other sections refer to things I recall happening to me, but kne/o/w just as well I never wrote out. Then there are pages that, today, I interpret one way with the clear recollection of having interpreted them another at the last rereading.

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