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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
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Renewal
Prose
Poetry
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More quotes by Samuel R. Delany
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
I read The NAMBLA Bulletin fairly regularly and I think it is one of the most intelligent discussions of sexuality I've ever found...I would have been so much happier as an adolescent if NAMBLA had been around when I was 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.
Samuel R. Delany
Ambition like a liquid ruby stains.
Samuel R. Delany
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
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
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
I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.
Samuel R. Delany
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
The rich are always enamored of the ancient.
Samuel R. Delany
A sentence has meaning in the sense that a train has a track, not that a train has a passenger.
Samuel R. Delany
I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.
Samuel R. Delany
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
There is a sense of decency that's like a barometer to a man's or a country's health.
Samuel R. Delany
Breathing is a fascinating thing to watch in a woman.
Samuel R. Delany
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
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
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
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
In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.
Samuel R. Delany
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