Quotes by Samuel R. Delany

Well, your perfect erotic object remains only in recognition memory); and his absolute absence from reconstruction memory becomes the yearning that is, finally, desire. That socially surrounded absence, when you’re young, masks a lot of things in the real world; when you’re older and a few thousand sexual encounters have begun to clear what desire is about (or perhaps what really lies about desire) and you have begun to perceive desire’s edges, its effect is not so much that of an obliterator any more as it is that of a distorting lens. If you can smile at what you see through, it’s sometimes illuminating.

Do you follow the wrestling? Most people think its illegal, but you can watch it there. Ruby and Python are on display this evening.

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.

Everything in a science-fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts).

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

ABSTRACT THOUGHTS in a blue room; Nominative, genitive, etative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, illative, instructive, abessive, adessive, inessive, essive, allative, translative, comitative. Sixteen cases of the Finnish noun. Odd, some languages get by with only singular and plural. The American Indian languages even failed to distinguish number. Except Sioux, in which there was a plural only for animate objects. The blue room was round and warm and smooth. No way to say warm in French. There was only hot and tepid If theres no word for it, how do you think about it? And, if there isnt the proper form, you dont have the how even if you have the words. Imagine, in Spanish having to assign a sex to every object: dog, table, tree, can-opener. Imagine, in Hungarian, not being able to assign a sex to anything: he, she, it all the same word. Thou art my friend, but you are my king; thus the distinctions of Elizabeth the Firsts English. But with some oriental languages, which all but dispense with gender and number, you are my friend, you are my parent, and YOU are my priest, and YOU are my king, and YOU are my servant, and YOU are my servant whom Im going to fire tomorrow if YOU dont watch it, and YOU are my king whose policies I totally disagree with and have sawdust in YOUR head instead of brains, YOUR highness, and YOU may be my friend, but Im still gonna smack YOU up side the head if YOU ever say that to me again;And who the hell are you anyway . . .?

Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language.

When I was packing those, I caught myself taking all the important, profound, and indispensable titles I could – nearly filled the box. But one of the more eccentric librarians at the internment compound I’d gotten permission to riffle had put up a whole shelf full of cubes of women writers or texts about women. She was convinced nobody could be truly educated unless they’d read them – though nobody I ever met had, except her, maybe. […]

stupidity: a process, not a state. A human being takes in far more information than he or she can put out. “Stupidity” is a process or strategy by which a human, in response to social denigration of the information she or he puts out, commits him or herself to taking in no more information than she or he can put out. (Not to be confused with ignorance, or lack of data.) Since such a situation is impossible to achieve because of the nature of mind/perception itself in its relation to the functioning body, a continuing downward spiral of functionality and/or informative dissemination results,’ and he understood why! ‘The process, however, can be reversed,’ the voice continued, ‘at any time.

The mark of the truly civilized is their (truly baffling to the likes of you and me) patience with what truly baffles.

The yellow eyes had fallen from the tired star. Lorqs face erupted about the scar at some antic from the Mouse that Katin had missed. Rage, Katin pondered. Rage. Yes, he is laughing. But how is anyone supposed to distinguish between laughter and rage in that face? But the others were laughing too. Yet some way, somehow, we do.

There are three types of actions: purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters, to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three. Katin looked toward the front of the car. The captain gazed through the curving plate that lapped the roof. His yellow eyes fixed Her consumptive light that pulsed fire-spots in a giant cinder. The light was so weak he did not squint at all. I am confounded, Katin admitted to his jeweled box, nevertheless. The mirror of my observation turns and what first seemed gratuitous I see enough times to realize it is a habit. What I suspected as habit now seems part of a great design. While what I originally took as purpose explodes into gratuitousness. The mirror turns again, and the character I thought obsessed by purpose reveals his obsession is only habit; his habits are gratuitously meaningless; while those actions i construed as gratuitous now reveal a most demonic end.

Writers are people who write. By and large, they are not happy people. Theyre not good at relationships. Often theyre drunks. And writing—good writing—does not get easier and easier with practice. It gets harder and harder—so that eventually the writer must stall out into silence. The silence that waits for every writer and that, inevitably, if only with death, the writer must fall into is angst-ridden and terrifying—and often drives us mad. So if youre not a writer, consider yourself fortunate.

To be sure, the Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom, even when it takes you through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. Just watch out for parasites.

An artist simply cannot trust any public emblem of merit.

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 Im a lot more interested in than what they do under the pressure of a gunfight.

Science fiction isnt just thinking about the world out there. Its also thinking about how that world might be - a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if theyre 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.

“You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they cant express, and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesnt hurt any more: thats my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.”