187 Quotes by Samuel R. Delany

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.

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.

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.

I think of myself as someone who thinks largely through writing. Thus I write more than most people, and I write in many different forms. I think of myself as the kind of person who writes, rather than as one kind of writer or another.

A number of things in 'Dhalgren' are just meant to function as mysteries. They're mysteries when the book begins, and they're mysteries when the book ends.

One of the more depressing things about reading your fiction 25 years later, or 10 years later, is you realize the only things going on are things you made go on. Strange and interesting and new and wonderful things don't happen. It's the book you wrote; that's all.

It looks like the writer is telling you a story. What the writer is actually doing, however, is using words to evoke a series of micromemories from your own experience that inmix, join, and connect in your mind in an order the writer controls, so that, in effect, you have a sustained memory of something that never happened to you.

My family trained me to be polite to people I had just met, and that included strangers. You speak when you're spoken to. You look people in the eye when they address you and when you address them back.

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.