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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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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
Stories
Saws
Extension
Hugo
School
Early
Extensions
Greats
Best
Fiction
Thrust
Didactic
Many
Particular
Publishers
Educators
Children
Worst
Teenage
Fare
Seen
Fulfillment
Publisher
Wish
Genre
Initially
Science
Amazing
Educator
Pegged

More quotes by Samuel R. Delany

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In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.
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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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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The rich are always enamored of the ancient.
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 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.
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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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.
Samuel R. Delany
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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.
Samuel R. Delany
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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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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.
Samuel R. Delany
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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.
Samuel R. Delany
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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.
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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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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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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Topologically, men and women are identical. Some things are just larger and more developed in one than the other and positioned differently.
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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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
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The truth is always multiplex.
Samuel R. Delany