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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!

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
Machinery
Reputation
Source
Strange
Faith
Much
Faulty
Precedes

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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 am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on.
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Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes.
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Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not.
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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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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.
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The rich are always enamored of the ancient.
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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.
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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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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 poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing. ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words.
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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.
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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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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.
Samuel R. Delany
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I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently.
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Breathing is a fascinating thing to watch in a woman.
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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.
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I suppose the problem ... is that we have an inside and an outside. We've got problems both places, but it's so hard to tell where the one stops and the other takes up.
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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