Samuel R. Delany Quotes & Sayings

I read The NAMBLA Bulletin fairly regularly and I think it is one of the most intelligent discussions of sexuality I've ever found ... I would have been so much happier as an adolescent if NAMBLA had been around when I was 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. — Samuel R. Delany

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

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. — Samuel R. Delany

There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky's variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful. — Samuel R. Delany

You can be bored with anything if you try hard enough. — Samuel R. Delany

In the cups, one after another, glistening disks rose, black without translucence. — Samuel R. Delany

Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language. — Samuel R. Delany

There are two types of codes, ciphers, and true codes. In the first, letters, or symbols that stand for letters, are shuffled and juggled according to a pattern. In the second, letters, words, or groups of words are replaced by other letters, symbols, or words. A code can be one type or the other, or a combination. But both have this in common: once you find the key, you just plug it in and out come logical sentences. A language, however, has its own internal logic, its own grammar, its own way of putting thoughts together with words that span various spectra of meaning. There is no key you can plug in to unlock the exact meaning. At best you can get a close approximation. — Samuel R. Delany

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. — Samuel R. Delany

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

They were nice in a useless sort of way, which is, after all, the only way to be truly nice. — Samuel R. Delany

Down, everybody! Down on all fours! We're going to show you our new step! Like this: just swing your up and - — Samuel R. Delany

You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city ... you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't even know were there. Everything changes. — Samuel R. Delany

You have to grow all the time," I said. "Not necessarily get bigger. But inside your head you have to grow, kid-boy. For us human-type people that's what's important. And that kind of growing never stops. At least it shouldn't. You can grow, kid-boy; or you can die. That's the choice you've got, and it goes on all of your life. — Samuel R. Delany

I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently. — Samuel R. Delany

'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

To the extent that the short story is an art, Sturgeon is the American short-story writer. — Samuel R. Delany

Wind passed again; the iris shuddered about the diamond chip. — Samuel R. Delany

Well, your perfect erotic object remains only in recognition memory); and his absolute absence from reconstruction memory becomes the yearning that is, finally, desire. That socially surrounded absence, when you're young, masks a lot of things in the real world; when you're older and a few thousand sexual encounters have begun to clear what desire is about (or perhaps what really lies about desire) and you have begun to perceive desire's edges, its effect is not so much that of an obliterator any more as it is that of a distorting lens. If you can smile at what you see through, it's sometimes illuminating. — Samuel R. Delany

(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. — Samuel R. Delany

I am mad again, he thought. Tears brimmed. He swallowed in a tightened throat. I don't want to be. I'm tired, I'm tired and horny, I'm so tired I can't make sense out of any of it and my mind won't work right half the time I try. I'm thirsty. My head's all filled with kapok coffee wouldn't clear. Still, I wish I had some. Where am I going, what am I doing, stumbling in this smoking graveyard? It's not the pain; only that the pain keeps going on. He tried to let all his muscles go and stepped aimlessly from sidewalk to gutter, his mouth dryer and dryer and dryer. Well, he thought, if it hurts, it hurts. It's only pain. — Samuel R. Delany

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

If people are busy living out myths you don't like, leave them to it. — Samuel R. Delany

'Dhalgren' is the kind of book in which you can look for pretty much anything you want. I tried to put as much into it as I could at the time. — Samuel R. Delany

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

You are trapped in that bright moment where you learned your doom — Samuel R. Delany

In Arachnia as it is spoken on Nepiy, 'she' is the pronoun for all sentient individuals of whatever species who have achieved the legal status of 'woman'. The ancient, dimorphic form 'he', once used exclusively for the genderal indication of males (cf. the archaic term man, pl. men), for more than a hundred-twenty years now, has been reserved for the general sexual object of 'she', during the period of excitation, regardless of the gender of the woman speaking or the gender of the woman referred to. — Samuel R. Delany

The rich are always enamored of the ancient. — Samuel R. Delany

The reason for privacy is not so that people will not know you go to the bathroom. It's to allow certain things to go on that you don't want other people to know about, when all is said and done. But the things I don't want other people to know about are not my sex life. — Samuel R. Delany

He stopped, because he wasn't sure what Cryptography had established, and because he needed another moment to haul himself down from the ledges of her high cheekbones, to retreat from the caves of her eyes. — Samuel R. Delany

Clouds out of control decoct anticipation. What use can any of us have for two moons? The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen. — Samuel R. Delany

When he's connected up to your nervous system, you'll be able to make him whistle, hiss, roar, flap his wings, and spit sparks, though it may take a few days to assimilate him into your body picture. Don't be surprised if at first he just burps and looks seasick. Take your shirt off, please. — Samuel R. Delany

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

It looks like the writer is telling you a story. What the writer is actually doing, however, is using words to evoke a series of micromemories from your own experience that inmix, join, and connect in your mind in an order the writer controls, so that, in effect, you have a sustained memory of something that never happened to you. — Samuel R. Delany

Bellona used to be a pretty good town. — Samuel R. Delany

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. — Samuel R. Delany

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. — Samuel R. Delany

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. — Samuel R. Delany

Driftglass," I said. "You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut-crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?"
I know the Coca-Cola bottles."
They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, changing their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral. When the pieces dry, they're milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again. — Samuel R. Delany

Don't go chattering to the stars if you're going to do it with your eyes closed. — Samuel R. Delany

I do not say, however, that every delusion or wandering of the mind should be called madness. Erasmus of Rotterdam, The Praise of Folly There — Samuel R. Delany

Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind
vividly, forcefully ... — Samuel R. Delany

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

How true,' returned the measured, featureless voice. 'I would chuckle in amused agreement, but the laughter switches of my translator have been malfunctioning for the past six hours. You understand.'

'Certainly,' I said. And somehow felt much more comfortable. — Samuel R. Delany

It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal. — Samuel R. Delany

Growing older I descend November. The asymptotic cycle of the year plummets to now. In crystal reveries 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." - from Electra — Samuel R. Delany

The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society's values, can force it to change. — Samuel R. Delany

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. — Samuel R. Delany

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

You know the way some Orientals confuse the sounds of R and L when they speak a Western language? That's because R and L in many Eastern languages are allophones, that is, considered the same sound, written and even heard the same - just like the th at the beginning of they and at the beginning of theater." "What's different about the sound of theater and they?" "Say them again and listen. One's voiced and the other's unvoiced, they're as distinct as V and F; only they're allophones - at least in British English; so Britishers are used to hearing them as though they were the same phoneme. — Samuel R. Delany

I wonder sometimes if the purpose of the artistic community isn't to provide a concerned social matrix which simultaneously assures that no member, regardless of honors or approbation, has the slightest idea of the worth of his own work." Kidd — Samuel R. Delany

I shall always be able to come up with new fantasies. As long as there are people walking around in the street, as long as I have books to read and windows to look out of, I'm not going to use them up. — Samuel R. Delany

To be sure, the Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom, even when it takes you through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. Just watch out for parasites. — Samuel R. Delany

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

What I write [ ... ] doesn't seem to be ... true. I mean I can model so little of what it's about. 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. In my loft, alone, in the middle of the night, it comes blaring in. So I work at culling enough from it to construct moments of order. — Samuel R. Delany

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

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

Spending practically every minute of your day on pure survival is an absolutely boring life. — Samuel R. Delany

Dictators during the entire history of this planet have used similar techniques. By not letting the people of their country know what conditions existed outside their boundaries, they could get the people to fight to stay in those conditions. It was the old adage: Convince a slave that he's free , and he will fight to maintain his slavery . — Samuel R. Delany

I still believe pattern fascinates on its own. And three-sevenths of a pattern, or even a smaller fragment, can fascinate still more
get us really hunkering down, trying to tease out the whole of the figure in the carpet. — Samuel R. Delany

The fantasy/reality confusion ... it's just marvelous in her work. I mean, there, it's practically like what we do, the fantasy working as a sort of metalogic, with which she can solve real, aesthetic problems in the most incredible ways
I was actually in a few of her productions last year, a sort of ersatz member of the company. But finally I just had to get out. Because when that fantasy seeps into the reality, she just becomes an incredibly ugly person. She feels she can distort anything that occurs for whatever purpose she wants. Whatever she feels, that's what is, as far as she's concerned. But then, I suppose ... ' Bron laughed at the ground, then looked up: they'd just left the Plaza
'that's the right we just fought a war to defend. But Audri, when someone abuses that right, it can make it pretty awful for the rest of us. — Samuel R. Delany

In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next. — Samuel R. Delany

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 for that. — Samuel R. Delany

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

And what have I invested in interpreting disfocus for chaos? This threat: the only lesson is to wait. I crouch in the smoggy terminus. The streets lose edges, the rims of thought flake. What have I set myself to fix in this dirty notebook that is not mine? Does the revelation that, though it cannot be done with words, it might be accomplished in some lingual gap, give me the right, in injury, walking with a woman and her dog in pain? Rather the long doubts: that this labor tears up the mind's moorings; that, though life may be important in the scheme, awareness is an imperfect tool with which to face it. To reflect is to fight away the sheets of silver, the carbonated distractions, the feeling that, somehow, a thumb is pressed on the right eye. This exhaustion melts what binds, releases what flows. — Samuel R. Delany

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. — Samuel R. Delany

It is better to accept the inevitable with energy. Well then, if I have not chosen up till now, now I choose. That is freedom. Having chosen, I am free. Somewhere in my memory — Samuel R. Delany

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. — Samuel R. Delany

Things have made you what you are," she recited "What you are will make you what you will become. — Samuel R. Delany

The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear. — Samuel R. Delany

The Family/Sygn conflict is in the process of creating a schism throughout the entire galaxy, concerning just what exactly a woman is. And it may mean that instead of one universe with six thousand worlds in it, we will have a universe with one group of some thousands of worlds and another group of some thousands of others, and no connection between the two save memories of murder, starvation, and violence. And in a situation like that, no, you do not just simply decide to up and change sides! — Samuel R. Delany

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

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 any more: that's my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them. — Samuel R. Delany

...in a universe where both information and misinformation are constantly suspect, reviewed and drifing as they must be (constantly) by and between the two, a moment when either information or misinformation turns out to be harmless must bloom, when surrounded by the workings of desire and terror, into the offered sign of all about it, making and marking all about it innocent by contamination. — Samuel R. Delany

I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off. — Samuel R. Delany

The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow. — Samuel R. Delany

Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes. — Samuel R. Delany

One of the more depressing things about reading your fiction 25 years later, or 10 years later, is you realize the only things going on are things you made go on. Strange and interesting and new and wonderful things don't happen. It's the book you wrote; that's all. — Samuel R. Delany

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

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

Ambition like a liquid ruby stains. — Samuel R. Delany

That most embarrassing of statistical fictions, the commercial reader (not you, of course; not me), who presumably consumes texts only for story, is assumed to stand deaf to style, and is thought to applaud only the endlessly repeated pornographies of action and passion that, for all their violences, still manage to pander to an astonishingly untroubled acceptance of the personal and political status quo. — Samuel R. Delany

It's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's — Samuel R. Delany

I grew up in Harlem, a block away from what was then the most crowded block in New York City, according to the 1950 census. Something like ten thousand people lived in one city block. — Samuel R. Delany

The particular verbal freedom of SF, coupled with the corrective process that allows the whole range of the physically explainable universe, can produce the most violent leaps of imagery. For not only does it throw us worlds away, it specifies how we got there. — Samuel R. Delany

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 - — Samuel R. Delany

It is a magic book. Words mean things. When you put them together they speak. Yes, sometimes they flatten out and nothing they say is real, and that is one kind of magic. But sometimes a vision will rip up from them and shriek and clank wings clear as the sweat smudge on the paper under your thumb. And that is another kind. — Samuel R. Delany

Suggestion is a literary strategy. — Samuel R. Delany

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. — Samuel R. Delany

In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all. — Samuel R. Delany

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

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. — Samuel R. Delany

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. — Samuel R. Delany

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. — Samuel R. Delany

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

However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory -not on the order of actual occurrence. — Samuel R. Delany

Bear in mind that the novel
no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective
is always an historical projection of its own time. — Samuel R. Delany

Do you follow the wrestling? Most people think it's illegal, but you can watch it there. Ruby and Python are on display this evening. — Samuel R. Delany

It's only ... when we're stripped of purpose that we know who we are. — Samuel R. Delany

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