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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

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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
Anything
Spectator
Ideas
Spectators
Identical
Even
Mention
Vulgar
Idea
Experience
Artist

More quotes by Samuel R. Delany

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Power is all. Another falsification I do not tell how I gain or maintain it. I only record the ginger stroll through the vaguely fetid garden of its rewards.
Samuel R. Delany
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Ambition like a liquid ruby stains.
Samuel R. Delany
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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
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The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.
Samuel R. Delany
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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
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The rich are always enamored of the ancient.
Samuel R. Delany
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There is a sense of decency that's like a barometer to a man's or a country's health.
Samuel R. Delany
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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
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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
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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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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
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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
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In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.
Samuel R. Delany
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A sentence has meaning in the sense that a train has a track, not that a train has a passenger.
Samuel R. Delany
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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
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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
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Breathing is a fascinating thing to watch in a woman.
Samuel R. Delany
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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
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As a prose writer, I work with language and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.
Samuel R. Delany
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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