Top 11 Samuel R. Delany Quotes

However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory -not on the order of actual occurrence.

A number of things in ‘Dhalgren’ are just meant to function as mysteries. They’re mysteries when the book begins, and they’re mysteries when the book ends.

I grew up in Harlem, a block away from what was then the most crowded block in New York City, according to the 1950 census. Something like ten thousand people lived in one city block.

How we treat our invalids – our mad, our physically or mentally compromised family members – does tell you something about who we are politically, historically, culturally.

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.

I think of myself as someone who thinks largely through writing. Thus I write more than most people, and I write in many different forms. I think of myself as the kind of person who writes, rather than as one kind of writer or another.

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.

One of the more depressing things about reading your fiction 25 years later, or 10 years later, is you realize the only things going on are things you made go on. Strange and interesting and new and wonderful things don’t happen. It’s the book you wrote; that’s all.

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.

Linguistics is very much a science. It’s a human science, one of the human sciences. And it’s one of the more interesting human sciences.

I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently.