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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
Much
Faulty
Precedes
Machinery
Reputation
Source
Strange
Faith

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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.
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.
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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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In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.
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Breathing is a fascinating thing to watch in a woman.
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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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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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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Ambition like a liquid ruby stains.
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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 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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There is a sense of decency that's like a barometer to a man's or a country's health.
Samuel R. Delany