Quotes from Samuel R. Delany

I say I think my poems now are finer than anything I've ever done; I only hope that is the judgement of a ruined mind, with critical faculties shocked and fragmented on grief; because if they are great ... they cost too much!

Things have made you what you are," she recited. "What you are will make you what you will become.

What do you want to change in the world?" she continued her recitation, looking away. "What do you want to preserve? What is the thing you're searching for? What are you running away from?" "Nothing," he said. "And nothing. And nothing. And…nothing, at least that I know.

It's Bo Jonas. Bo is short for Beauregard. Can you spell Beauregard?" Denny frowned. "B-o-r-r ..." "It's short for Bobby," Hogg said.

When the smoke thins, I can look across at the other buildings. So many of the windows are broken. Maybe the maintenance men in Arthur's office have already started putting in new panes.

held all his flickering presence, gentle as mist in my arms, hard as metal.

I am the wild machinist, past destroyed, reconstructing the present.

Basically, gentlemen, Ulyrion is something else.

Religion and art are both forms of madness, and madness is the realm of psychiatry.

high. She was Oriental, he

Delany's primary dramatic purpose, sounded in the novel's opening line, is to give a significant portrait, and ultimately a sympathetic one, of a monster—a laudable science fiction theme if there ever was one, dating from Frankenstein. But Delany has transferred his theme pornography: his monster is a sexual human.

We raised them in, oh, such a carefully controlled nutrient environment, speeding the growth rate by hormones and other things. But the beauty of it was the experiential imprinting. Gorgeously healthy creatures; you have no idea how much care they received." "I once spent a summer on a cattle farm," Rydra said shortly. The

Books kept connecting with books. That is what made them live…

Rydra, when I look at the night and stars, it is only a passive act, but you are active even watching, and halo the stars with more luminous flame.

But right now I want to answer his question." He turned back to Lorq. "But to tell you—" he walked to the wall and gazed out across the city—"I have to tell you some history. And not what you learned at Causby.

That horse dick he got swinging between his legs is just full of that there compassion

The whole mechanism of guilt as a deterrent to right action is just as much a linguistic fault.

Well, man, there ain't nothing I like to eat out better than pecker-poked pig-pussy!

It is the novelist's duty to attack society, for its false complacency, for its repressive rigidity, and for its self-righteous insensitivity. Society is women. Therefore, the novelist must attack and punish women in his works.

You're Transport.' " She shrugged. "I'm neither. But even so, I was tripled. I know about that." "Customs don't triple," he said. "Two guys and myself. If I ever do it again it'll be with a girl and a guy. For me that would be easier

Health lies -- implicitly -- in merging with something (matter) rather than nothing (vacuum).

It is not that female characters in the modern novel are characterizations of bad or limited people—although, incidentally, they almost always are—but that they are badly drawn, because the writers flatly refuse to apply the same complex of literary artifice in their character realizations to both males and females—out of habits that begin as a response to some terror that human individuation would make the female characters equal to the males.

For three thousand years everyone has tried to find a word to differentiate man from other animals; some of the ancients called him the laughing animal, some the moral animal. Well, I wonder if he isn't the embarrassed animal...

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.