187 Quotes by Samuel R. Delany

Lots of people do things lots better than lots of others; but, today, so many people do so many things very well, and so many people are seriously interested in so many different things people do for their own different reasons, you can’t call any thing the best for every person, or even every serious person. So you just pay real attention to the real things that affect you; and don’t waste your time knocking the rest.

Do you think a city can control the way the people live inside it? I mean, just the geography, the way the streets are laid out, the way the buildings are placed?

Things have made you what you are,” she recited “What you are will make you what you will become.

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

But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if you’re lucky, a doctor who has an unusual amount of sense-stranger than the hallucinations, or the voices, or the anxiety-is the way you begin to experience the edges of the mind itself... in a way other people just can’t.

That seemed to be, if anything, the power of writing – to hold sway over memory, making it public, keeping it private, possibly, even, keeping it secret from oneself –.

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.

I spend a lot of time thinking, if not daydreaming. People think of me as a genre writer, and a genre writer is supposed to be prolific. Since that's how people perceive me, they have to say I'm prolific. But I don't find that either complimentary or accurate.

I'm not about either entertaining or instructing. The entertaining and instructing are secondary fallout from the fundamental thing, which is basically to create an aesthetic object.