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

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
Thinking
People
Differently
Lazy
Writer
Though
Think

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I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.
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'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!'
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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.
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Ambition like a liquid ruby stains.
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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.
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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
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The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.
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Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.
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The rich are always enamored of the ancient.
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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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The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.
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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