If I had enough self-confidence, in the midst of this bland continual chaos into which you've shunted me, for hate, I should hate you. But I don't have it.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
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, Dhalgren
Jerk a man from one world. Fling him into another. It will take him the same time to realize where he is as to remember where he was. Each location defines the other.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, The Fall of the Towers
In scarcity societies, you just don't have the same sort, or frequency, of discipline problems as you do in an affluent society. In a scarcity society the landscape itself becomes your spy, your SS, and your jailer, all in one.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, Science Fiction Studies, Nov. 1990
Pain ... after you've lived with it long enough, isn't pain anymore. It's something else.
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, Dhalgren
Sadness or joy, equal and one, have caused each ended race I have begun.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, The Fall of the Towers
Mental illness is still seen as a scourge of the Lord. Freud and his offspring turned it into a much more sophisticated scourge. But even for him it is essentially a state of distress resulting from how you have lived your life and how your parents lived theirs. And that is biblical leprosy, not the common cold.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, Dhalgren
Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind---vividly, forcefully.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews
Actions are interesting to watch. I learn about the actors. Their movements are emblems of the tensions in this internal landscape, which their actions resolve. About-to-act is an interesting state to experience, because I am conscious of just those tensions. Acting itself feels fairly dull; it not only resolves, it obliterates those tensions from my consciousness. Acting is only interesting as it leads to new tensions that, irrelevantly, cause me to act again.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, Dhalgren
A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the pain and yowls at the weapons that lacerate him; the great poet explores the inflamed lips of ruined flesh with ice-caked fingers, glittering and precise; but ultimately his poem is the echoing, dual voice reporting the damages.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, The Fall of the Towers
The factors controlling a writer's popularity are as mysterious and ultimately as unknowable as the number of stars in the sky.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, SF Site interview, Apr. 2001
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, Nerve interview, Jun. 14, 2001
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, Dhalgren
The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.
Things have made you what you are.... What you are will make you what you will become.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, Dhalgren
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, Conversations with Samuel R. Delany
As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, Rain Taxi, winter 2000/2001
There is a sense of decency that's like a barometer to a man's or a country's health.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, The Fall of the Towers
The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically 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. That idea comes from an over-industrialized society which has learned to distrust magic.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, Dhalgren
When the old I see, I know how much the new I need.
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, Nerve interview, Jun. 14, 2001
When what is is congruent to what is supposed, the reaction is functional and the mental processes competent. When what is and what is supposed have nothing to do with each other, the choice of reactions is random. Something tears.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, The Fall of the Towers
It's frightening for one artist to see another one, any other one turn away from art.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, Dhalgren
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