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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

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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
Never
Religion
Clerics
Often
Redeem
Art
Ages
Today
Forgive
Able
Forgiving
Wells
However
Well
Middle
Thing
Age

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A sentence has meaning in the sense that a train has a track, not that a train has a passenger.
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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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I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.
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There is a sense of decency that's like a barometer to a man's or a country's health.
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It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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The strange machinery by which a reputation precedes its source we all know is faulty. Yet how much faith we put in it!
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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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The truth is always multiplex.
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But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it.
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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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I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently.
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Ambition like a liquid ruby stains.
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The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.
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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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In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.
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