187 Quotes by Samuel R. Delany

To yell about freedom from desire with your cock in your fist, is that enough to start a revolution?

We all live our lives from the inside of our bodies out, not from the outside in. Which is why fiction has the texture that it does.

We are the ink in which are written other messages that we cannot even understand.

Life is a very terrible thing, mostly, with points of wonder and beauty. Most of what makes it terrible, though, is simply that there's so much of it, blaring in through the five senses.

You can program a computer to make mistakes, and you do it not by crossing wires, but by manipulating the 'language' you teach it to 'think' in.

Some people’s information is other people’s misinformation and even disinformation. That is pretty much the contemporary condition.

Plato’s discussants and querents are not polite as students and teachers are polite. They are polite the way only fantasy discussants can be civil inside a fantasy. Were they real, they’d be at each other’s throats before eight or nine pages were done.

Bear in mind that the novel--no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective--is always an historical projection of its own time.

I think of myself as somebody who is interested in the differences, the differences between straight society and gay, the differences between male and female, but all of those presuppose a set of similarities on which those differences have to be marked out. Beginnings and endings are the hardest parts for thinkers who utilize such structures.