I shall always be able to come up with new fantasies. As long as there are people walking around in the street, as long as I have books to read and windows to look out of, I'm not going to use them up. Samuel R. Delany More Quotes by Samuel R. Delany More Quotes From Samuel R. Delany I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated. Samuel R. Delany suspects life Ah, well, during the Middle Ages, religion was often able to redeem art. Today, however, art is about the only thing that can redeem religion, and the clerics will never forgive us for that. Samuel R. Delany forgiving age art It's frightening for one artist to see another one, any other one turn away from art. Samuel R. Delany turns artist art Clouds out of control decoct anticipation. What use can any of us have for two moons? The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen. Samuel R. Delany moon clouds running Suggestion is a literary strategy. Samuel R. Delany strategy suggestions 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. Samuel R. Delany me time people thinking 'Dhalgren' is the kind of book in which you can look for pretty much anything you want. I tried to put as much into it as I could at the time. Samuel R. Delany look you time book 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. Samuel R. Delany someone myself think people I grew up in Harlem, a block away from what was then the most crowded block in New York City, according to the 1950 census. Something like ten thousand people lived in one city block. Samuel R. Delany city new new-york people 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. Samuel R. Delany new you reading book 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. Samuel R. Delany me you family people 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. Samuel R. Delany either about create aesthetic 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. Samuel R. Delany memory you experience mind However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory -not on the order of actual occurrence. Samuel R. Delany lose memory story experience
