Samuel R. Delany Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• Honesty is the best policy ; a policy is, after all, a strategy for living in the polis in the city.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Honesty, Cities, Strategy

  "The Mad Man". Book by Samuel R. Delany, 1994.

  5 Copy quote

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

  Samuel R. Delany

  Language, Renewal, Turns

  Samuel R. Delany, Carl Howard Freedman (2009). “Conversations with Samuel R. Delany”, p.55, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  5 Copy quote

• Suggestion is a literary strategy.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Suggestions, Strategy

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Interesting, Linguistics, Humans

  5 Copy quote

• From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Gay, Black

  Samuel R. Delany, Carl Howard Freedman (2009). “Conversations with Samuel R. Delany”, p.96, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  4 Copy quote

• Historically, I guess that's how science fiction works: you start by using aliens to think the unthinkable — and then, eventually, another writer, having grown a little more comfortable with the earlier notion, brings it into the human.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Thinking, Fiction, Littles

  "Space Cowboy: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany". Interview with Scott Westerfeld, www.nerve.com. 2001.

  5 Copy quote

• There is a sense of decency that's like a barometer to a man's or a country's health.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Country, Men, Barometer

  Samuel R. Delany, Robert M. Williams (1964). “The towers of Toron”

  5 Copy quote

• In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Opposites, Next, Myth

  Samuel R. Delany (2011). “Einstein Intersection”, p.28, Wesleyan University Press

  8 Copy quote

• I want to read about a character doing something fairly quiet where I can picture who the character is, and what their attitude towards the world is - which I'm a lot more interested in than what they do under the pressure of a gunfight.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Attitude, Character, World

  5 Copy quote

• A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the pain and yowls at the weapons that lacerate him; the great poet explores the inflamed lips of ruined flesh with ice-caked fingers, glittering and precise; but ultimately his poem is the echoing, dual voice reporting the damages.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Pain, Ice, Poetry

  6 Copy quote

• The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing. ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Trying, Energy, Moments

  7 Copy quote

• I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Infinity, Eternity, Terror

  7 Copy quote

• Like contemporary poetry, philosophy is one of those things, especially at the beginning stages, most people would rather do than study - which is why most of what gets done is so impoverished.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Philosophy, People, Done

  "The Mad Man". Book by Samuel R. Delany, 1994.

  5 Copy quote

• If you are to stay in the good graces of the powerful, you had best, however unobtrusively, please the servants of the powerful.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Powerful, Grace, Servant

  Samuel R. Delany (1993). “Tales of Nevèrÿon”, p.44, Wesleyan University Press

  5 Copy quote

• Each of us, with money, gets further and further away from those moments where the hand pulls the beet root from the soil, shakes the fish from the net into the basket -- not to mention the way it separates us from one another, so that when enough money comes between people, they lie apart like parts of a chicken hacked up for stewing.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Money, Lying, Hands

  Samuel R. Delany (2011). “Tales of Neveryeon”, p.171, Wesleyan University Press

  5 Copy quote

• Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Rhetoric, Discourse, Preserves

  Samuel R. Delany (2014). “The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch—“Angouleme””, p.150, Wesleyan University Press

  5 Copy quote

• I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Thinking, People, Lazy

  4 Copy quote

• Many of the early greats of sf — Hugo Gernsback (publisher of Amazing Stories) in particular — saw themselves as educators. The didactic thrust of science fiction got the genre initially pegged as children's fare. It was seen, at its best, as an extension of school and, at its worst, as teenage wish fulfillment.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Children, Teenage, School

  4 Copy quote

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

  Samuel R. Delany

  Order, Confusion, Half

  Samuel R. Delany (2004). “The Fall of the Towers”, Vintage

  5 Copy quote

• Fiction -- at least for me -- requires long, relatively uninterrupted time stretches in which to bring it to fruition. I've never been a two-hour-in-the-morning writer, who could put in another six hours on Sunday afternoon. For me, a novel requires weeks of living in a largely mental and wholly internal landscape. Everything else has to be relegated to the odd hour here, the bit of time there. Sadly, however, uninterrupted time blocks are not what life doles out today to any of us with regularity.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Morning, Block, Sunday

  Samuel R. Delany, Carl Howard Freedman (2009). “Conversations with Samuel R. Delany”, p.94, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  5 Copy quote

• I think a 23-page ordinary comic is an investment for the artist, but if you're doing something 60 to 104 pages, that's a really big investment for an artist. So unless you've got someone who wants to pay you while you're doing it or up front, it's kind hard to get someone to do that with you, unless you're the artist yourself.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Artist, Thinking, Ordinary

  5 Copy quote

• The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts , but that it generates a way of thinking.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Philosophy, Thinking, Way

  Samuel R. Delany (2011). “Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia”, p.307, Wesleyan University Press

  5 Copy quote

• There is a hollow, holey cylinder running from hilt to point in my machete. When I blow across the mouthpiece in the handle, I make music with my blade. When all the holes are covered, the sound is sad, as rough as rough can be and be called smooth. When all the holes are open, the sound pipes about, bringing to the eye flakes of sun on water, crushed metal. There are twenty holes. And since I've been playing music, I've been called all different kinds of fool - more times than Lobey, which is my name.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Running, Eye, Blow

  4 Copy quote

• The idea that certain things in life - and in the universe - don't yield up their secrets is something that requires a slightly more mature reader to accept.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Yield, Things In Life, Ideas

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. August 8, 2001.

  4 Copy quote

• 'You spin in the sky, the world spins under you, and you step from land to land, while we . . .' She turned her head right, left, and her black hair curled and uncurled on the shoulder of her coat. 'We have our dull, circled lives, bound in gravity, worshiping you!'

  Samuel R. Delany

  Hair, Land, Sky

  5 Copy quote

Page 3 of 4

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin