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

stupidity: a process, not a state. A human being takes in far more information than he or she can put out. "Stupidity" is a process or strategy by which a human, in response to social denigration of the information she or he puts out, commits him or herself to taking in no more information than she or he can put out. (Not to be confused with ignorance, or lack of data.) Since such a situation is impossible to achieve because of the nature of mind/perception itself in its relation to the functioning body, a continuing downward spiral of functionality and/or informative dissemination results,' and he understood why! 'The process, however, can be reversed,' the voice continued, 'at any time. — 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

It's easy to repeat; it's hard to speak, — Samuel R. Delany

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

Reality must prove itself again and again to questioners ... it is the fantasy which goes on without contradiction, without having to prove itself. — 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

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

Remember that you create your world. It's not what happens to you, but how you choose to deal with it. — Dana Delany

If you are angle, I am complement. If you are circle, I am circumscribed. — Samuel R. Delany

It always seemed to me that white people were judged as individuals. But if a Negro did something stupid or wrong, it was held against all of us. — Annie Elizabeth Delany

If we treated everyone we meet with the same affection we bestow upon our favorite cat, they, too, would purr. — Martin Delany

In our dreams we are always young. — Sarah Louise Delany

I am not in favor of caste, nor separation of the brotherhood of mankind, and would as willingly live among white men as Black, if I had equal possession and enjoyment of privileges, but I shall never be reconciled living among them subservient to their will. — Martin Delany

[On her 101-year-old sister and herself, at 103:] We have a lot to do ... People don't understand this. They think we're sitting around in rocking chairs, which isn't at all true. Why, we don't even own a rocking chair. — Sarah Louise Delany

When people ask me how we've lived past one hundred, I say, 'Honey, we never married. We never had husbands to worry us to death!
A. Elizabeth (Bessie) Delany — Amy Hill Hearth

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. — Samuel R. Delany

Actions are interesting to watch. I learn about the actors. Their movements are emblems of the tensions in this internal landscape, which their actions resolve. About-to-act is an interesting state to experience, because I am conscious of just those tensions. Acting itself feels fairly dull; it not only resolves, it obliterates those tensions from my consciousness. Acting is only interesting as it leads to new tensions that, irrelevantly, cause me to act again. — Samuel R. Delany

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

I can think of no series of words that could appear in a piece of naturalistic fiction that could not also appear in the same order in a piece of speculative fiction. I can, however, think of many series of words that, while fine for speculative fiction, would be meaningless as naturalism. Which then is the major and which the subcategory? — Samuel R. Delany

Bitch, on that world, was what men called women they were extremely fond of or extremely displeased with when the woman was not there. — Samuel R. Delany

Desire isn't appeased by its object, only irritated into something more than desire that can join with the stars to inform the chaotic heavens with sense. — Samuel R. Delany

When runners win a big race these days, they get a car. When I won a big race, I got a ride. — Ron Delany

The pulp hero, though he may be a renegade, is a guy who doesn't feel. Anything. Ever. And for the adolescent male - pummeled by emotions left and right, whether arising from sexuality or resulting from his necessary encounters with authority - this hero is a blessing, a relief and a release. The world he lives in, where feelings are totally under control, looks to the adolescent boy like heaven! This hero's lack of feeling - like Star Trek's Spock - is what allows him to be a genius, or allows him to shoot the bad guys and/or aliens, without a quiver to his lip. — Samuel R. Delany

Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep. — Samuel R. Delany

Holy Hell! That was totally badass — Shannon Delany

Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet. — Sarah Louise Delany

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

In the arts, people are always waiting for someone or some movement to "fulfill her/its/his promise." Then, half-a-dozen or a dozen years on, others begin to realize that, really, something extraordinary was actually happening. — Samuel R. Delany

Most people here have spent most of their time someplace else. You learn — Samuel R. Delany

Their story, as the Delany sisters like to say, is not meant as "black" or "women's" history, but American history. It belongs to all of us. (From the Preface of "Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years) — Amy Hill Hearth

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

We all know that television is better for women as they get into their 40s. You could be more three-dimensional, not just the wife or the mother. — Dana 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

Those moments when we learn that mothers rage and fathers kill, that friends betray and authority is fallible, or that our own blank, innocent ignorance can destroy the pure, the good, and the loved are moments the very memory of which constitutes the beginning of a strategy to live in a world where such horrors exist. — Samuel R. Delany

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

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

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

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

The sad truth is, S - , most people are not writers. This has nothing to do with literacy - or intelligence, or general culture. There are people who can correct the grammar, spelling, diction, and style of a college English paper with the best of them - who are still not writers. Indeed, most of what gets published in books, magazines, and newspapers is not written by real writers - which is one reason why so much of it is so bad. — Samuel R. Delany

Television is more of a business. You can't take as many risks, because there's so many channels now, and the advertising's dropping. — Dana Delany

The dawn of space travel is the dawn of woman. — 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

We must make an issue, create an event, and establish a national position for ourselves: and never may expect to be respected as men and women, until we have undertaken some fearless, bold, and adventurous deeds of daring ... — Martin 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 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

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

Watching you two frustrate each other cracks me up," he snorted, putting the car into gear. "Don't do it and I'm guaranteed lots of laughs! How crazy is it: a werewolfrevving high and the human who wants him watches him date her friend!" ~ Max — Shannon Delany

He laughed. So you see, I'm not a nut. Not a real one, anyway. I haven't been a real nut in a long time. — 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

Am I going to change the world, or am I going to change me? Or maybe change the world a little bit, just by changing me? — Sarah Louise Delany

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

Some moments I believed Max could've easily been Red Riding Hood's wolf. But she probably would have liked it. — Shannon Delany

Now, though, I must rent a movie."
"You're going to do that?"
"Of course. I'm a werewolf, not a cretin. We have Blockbuster cards."
It blew my mind. Werewolfs rented DVDs. At my local Blockbuster. — Shannon Delany

I couldn't handle more railing against Alexi. He'd been a wreck recently. Before I could stop myself I blurted out the rumor running through school: " Max is having sex with multiple partners!" Oh. Crap. ~ Jess — Shannon Delany

The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen. I don't need more intimations of disorder. It has to be more than that! Search the smoke for the fire's base. Read from the coals neither success nor despair. This edge of boredom is as bright. I pass it, into the dark rim. There is the deceiving warmth that asks nothing. There are objects lost in double-light. — Samuel R. Delany

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

I sat on the bench by the willows and at my honey bun and read Triton. There are some awful things in the world, it's true, but there are also some great books. When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn't all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head. I'd like to write like Delany or Heinlein or Le Guin. — Jo Walton

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

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

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

I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated. — Samuel R. Delany

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

But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if you're lucky, a doctor who has an unusual amount of sense-stranger than the hallucinations, or the voices, or the anxiety-is the way you begin to experience the edges of the mind itself ... in a way other people just can't. — Samuel R. Delany

I like people who are still actively creating in their life, who aren't set, I don't feel like I'm set. And I don't have any baggage, for better or worse. I don't have any plants or pets or kids. I can lock the door and go. I need to be with somebody for whom that's okay. — Dana 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

Let us have an education, that shall practically develop our thinking faculties and manhood; and then, and only then, shall we be able to vie with our oppressors, go where we may ... — Martin Delany

The concept of a writer writing a vivid and accurate scene in a language transparent and devoid of decoration so that we see through to the object without writerly distraction suffers the same contradiction as the concept of a painter painting a vivid and accurate scene with pigments transparent and devoid of color, including white and black - so that the paint will not get between us and the picture. — Samuel R. Delany

Folks can't take advantage of you if you're doing what you want to. — Sarah L. Delany

Just because you're damaged doesn't mean you must damage others. You have choices. We all make them every day. — Shannon 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

I wanted to get out, Vyme, to keep going and not be trapped, to be free ... only I was cruel. I had the chance to do it, and I took it. Why is that bad, Vyme? Unless, of course, that's what being free means. — Samuel R. Delany

Truth provides the most diplomatic answer): I don't believe I've ever attended one since I was your age where I didn't feel, beforehand, an oppressive dread at the isolation that can reign in a large enough group of even the most intimate friends, much less an admixture of intimates, acquaintances, and strangers. Still, so much of my social education has been effected in such gatherings, so many true friendships have had their beginnings in meetings much like yours and mine, that I feel these affairs must not only be endured, but negotiated with a certain energy, if not commitment. — Samuel R. Delany

The rights of no oppressed people have ever yet been obtained by a voluntary act of justice on the part of the oppressors. — Martin 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

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

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

I don't know whether Asimov realized he was saying this as well, but as an old historical materialist, if only as an afterthought, he must have realized that he was saying too: No one here will ever look at you, read a word you write, or consider you in any situation, no matter whether the roof is falling in or the money is pouring in, without saying to him- or herself (whether in an attempt to count it or to discount it), 'Negro ... ' The racial situation, permeable as it might sometimes seem (and it is, yes, highly permeable), is nevertheless your total surround. Don't you ever forget it ... ! And I never have. — Samuel R. Delany

Get the Girl," he demanded. "She knows too much!"
Dammit. Why did people keep presuming that, and if it was true, why the hell couldn't my GPA reflect the fact? — Shannon Delany

It's a beautiful universe ... wondrous and the more exciting because no one has written plays and poems and built sculptures to indicate the structure of desire I negotiate every day as I move about in it. — Samuel R. Delany

I'm the worst rider. I'm a terrible rider. Me and horses are not a good mix. For some reason, people are always trying to get me on a horse in a movie. — Dana Delany

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

An artist simply cannot trust any public emblem of merit. — Samuel R. Delany

If you put Willem Dafoe, Liam Neeson and James Woods in a room together, there wouldn't be room for anyone else. — Dana Delany

How we treat our invalids - our mad, our physically or mentally compromised family members - does tell you something about who we are politically, historically, culturally. — Samuel R. Delany

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