187 Quotes by Samuel R. Delany

There is a sense of decency that’s like a barometer to a man’s or a country’s health.

The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful – though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.

Suggestion is a literary strategy.

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 can’t 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 doesn’t hurt any more: that’s my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.

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.

Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.

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

The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts, but that it generates a way of thinking.

Poetry is what is avoided as it is surrounded by translation.