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I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.

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
Writing
Seriously
Seemed
Took
Pay

More quotes by Samuel R. Delany

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Breathing is a fascinating thing to watch in a woman.
Samuel R. Delany
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I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.
Samuel R. Delany
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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.
Samuel R. Delany
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Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not.
Samuel R. Delany
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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
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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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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
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Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes.
Samuel R. Delany
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The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.
Samuel R. Delany
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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
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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.
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 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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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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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
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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
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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 rich are always enamored of the ancient.
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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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