Samuel R. Delany Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Samuel R. Delany quote about:
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“The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“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.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“It’s a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator’s experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist’s.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“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.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“Babes, I am so bored here that I don't think, since I've come, I've ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“It is a magic book. Words mean things. When you put them together they speak. Yes, sometimes they flatten out and nothing they say is real, and that is one kind of magic. But sometimes a vision will rip up from them and shriek and clank wings clear as the sweat smudge on the paper under your thumb. And that is another kind.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind---vividly, forcefully...”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“Many of the early greats of sf — Hugo Gernsback (publisher of Amazing Stories) in particular — saw themselves as educators. The didactic thrust of science fiction got the genre initially pegged as children's fare. It was seen, at its best, as an extension of school and, at its worst, as teenage wish fulfillment.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“Since I spent eighteen years of my life as a child, and nine years of that life as a pretty sexually active gay child, my complaint against the current attitudes is that they work mightily to silence the voices of children first and secondarily ignore what adults have to say who have been through these situations. One size fits all is never the way to handle any situation with a human dimension. Many, many children-and I was one of them-are desperate to establish some sort of sexual relation with an older and even adult figure.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“Actions are interesting to watch. I learn about the actors. Their movements are emblems of the tensions in this internal landscape, which their actions resolve. About-to-act is an interesting state to experience, because I am conscious of just those tensions. Acting itself feels fairly dull; it not only resolves, it obliterates those tensions from my consciousness. Acting is only interesting as it leads to new tensions that, irrelevantly, cause me to act again.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“In the arts, people are always waiting for someone or some movement to "fulfill her/its/his promise." Then, half-a-dozen or a dozen years on, others begin to realize that, really, something extraordinary was actually happening.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“It's frightening for one artist to see another one, any other one turn away from art.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's. That idea comes from an over-industrialized society which has learned to distrust magic.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“There is a sense of decency that's like a barometer to a man's or a country's health.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“Like contemporary poetry , philosophy is one of those things, especially at the beginning stages, most people would rather do than study which is why most of what gets done is so impoverished.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts , but that it generates a way of thinking.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“Topologically, men and women are identical. Some things are just larger and more developed in one than the other and positioned differently.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“Don't go chattering to the stars if you're going to do it with your eyes closed.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“The rich are always enamored of the ancient.”
-- Samuel R. Delany -
“There are three types of actions : purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters , to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three.”
-- Samuel R. Delany
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