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Science fiction doesn’t try to predict the future, but rather offers a significant distortion of the present…We sit around and look at what we see around us and we say how can the world be different
Samuel R. Delany
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Samuel R. Delany
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: April 1
Author
Cartoonist
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Samuel Ray Delany
Jr.
Samuel Ray Delany
Chip Delany
Samuel Ray Chip Delany
Jr.
K. Leslie Steiner
S. L. Kermit
Doesn
Predict
Around
Significant
Look
Offers
Looks
Fiction
Different
Present
Trying
Rather
World
Future
Science
Distortion
More quotes by Samuel R. Delany
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
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
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
The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.
Samuel R. Delany
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
The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.
Samuel R. Delany
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
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
Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes.
Samuel R. Delany
I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.
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
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
As a prose writer, I work with language and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.
Samuel R. Delany
In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.
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
Breathing is a fascinating thing to watch in a woman.
Samuel R. Delany
The night ... it is filled with bestial watchmen, trammeling the extremities and the interstices of the timeless city, portents fallen, constellated deities plummeting in ash and smoke, roaming the apocryphal cities, the cities of speculation and reconstituted disorder, of insemination and incipience, swept round with the dark.
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
'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
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