Samuel R. Delany Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts , but that it generates a way of thinking.
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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.
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The rich are always enamored of the ancient.
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Breathing is a fascinating thing to watch in a woman.
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Pain ... after you've lived with it long enough, isn't pain anymore. It's something else.
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In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.
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Fiction -- at least for me -- requires long, relatively uninterrupted time stretches in which to bring it to fruition. I've never been a two-hour-in-the-morning writer, who could put in another six hours on Sunday afternoon. For me, a novel requires weeks of living in a largely mental and wholly internal landscape. Everything else has to be relegated to the odd hour here, the bit of time there. Sadly, however, uninterrupted time blocks are not what life doles out today to any of us with regularity.
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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.
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Don't go chattering to the stars if you're going to do it with your eyes closed.
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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.
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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.
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The idea that certain things in life - and in the universe - don't yield up their secrets is something that requires a slightly more mature reader to accept.
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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.
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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.
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Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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What you are will make you what you will become.
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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.
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It is not that love sometimes makes mistakes, but that it is, essentially, a mistake. We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfections on to another person. One day the phantasmagoria vanishes, and with it love dies.
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It's only ... when we're stripped of purpose that we know who we are.
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Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not.
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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.
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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.
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Human beings being what they are, order spreads, given half a chance, almost as fast as confusion.
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