187 Quotes by Samuel R. Delany

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.

The truth is always multiplex.

Shiftrunes?” “Letters that are pronounced one way on their first occurrence in a text, another on their second, another on their third, and so on in a fixed sequence. It gives the poet an interesting technique to exploit: she can have pairs of words that alliterate visually but not phonetically as well as pairs that alliterate phonetically but not visually. And she can play the two off against each other.

There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky’s variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful.

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.

Do they have this word, I?’ “As a matter of fact they have three forms of it: I-below-a-temperature-of-six-degrees-centigrade, I-between-six-and-ninety-three-degrees-centigrade, and I-above-ninety-three.” The Butcher looked confused. “It has to do with their reproductive process,” Rydra explained. “When the temperature is below six degrees they’re sterile. They can only conceive when the temperature is between six and ninety-three, but to actually give birth, they have to be above ninety-three.

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.

I can think of no series of words that could appear in a piece of naturalistic fiction that could not also appear in the same order in a piece of speculative fiction. I can, however, think of many series of words that, while fine for speculative fiction, would be meaningless as naturalism. Which then is the major and which the subcategory?

It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.