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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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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
Culture
Harlem
Black
Liked
Art
Somewhere
Else
Dance
Kids
Theater
Music
Lived
Wasn
High

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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'You spin in the sky, the world spins under you, and you step from land to land, while we . . .' She turned her head right, left, and her black hair curled and uncurled on the shoulder of her coat. 'We have our dull, circled lives, bound in gravity, worshiping you!'
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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Clouds out of control decoct anticipation. What use can any of us have for two moons? The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen.
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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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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Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not.
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 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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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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It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.
Samuel R. Delany
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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.
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.
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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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 suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.
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