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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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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
Language
Work
Renewal
Prose
Poetry
Writer
Turn
Turns

More quotes by Samuel R. Delany

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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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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.
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.
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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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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Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not.
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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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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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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I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently.
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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Reality must prove itself again and again to questioners ... it is the fantasy which goes on without contradiction, without having to prove itself.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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
Samuel R. Delany