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 More Quotes by Samuel R. Delany More Quotes From Samuel R. Delany A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the pain and yowls at the weapons that lacerate him; the great poet explores the inflamed lips of ruined flesh with ice-caked fingers, glittering and precise; but ultimately his poem is the echoing, dual voice reporting the damages. Samuel R. Delany ice pain poetry Don't go chattering to the stars if you're going to do it with your eyes closed. Samuel R. Delany stars eye ifs The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow. Samuel R. Delany tomorrow past It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal. Samuel R. Delany belief arguing believe 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. Samuel R. Delany luxury levels suffering Sometimes you want to say things, and you're missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That's how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn't exist. Samuel R. Delany missing want ideas 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. Samuel R. Delany color hurt home The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing. ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words. Samuel R. Delany moments energy trying Breathing is a fascinating thing to watch in a woman. Samuel R. Delany fascinating breathing watches You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city...you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't even know were there. Everything changes. Samuel R. Delany cities house travel 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 terror infinity eternity Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep. Samuel R. Delany pretending hysterical authority In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next. Samuel R. Delany myth next opposites Do you know how hard it is to make a home?... That's something that a woman does from inside herself. You do it in the face of all sorts of opposition. Husbands are very appreciative when it works out well. But they're not that anxious to help. It's understandable. They don't know how. Samuel R. Delany work-out husband home 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 philosophy way thinking As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal. Samuel R. Delany renewal turns language There is a sense of decency that's like a barometer to a man's or a country's health. Samuel R. Delany barometer men country Fiction -- at least for me -- requires long, relatively uninterrupted time stretches in which to bring it to fruition. I've never been a two-hour-in-the-morning writer, who could put in another six hours on Sunday afternoon. For me, a novel requires weeks of living in a largely mental and wholly internal landscape. Everything else has to be relegated to the odd hour here, the bit of time there. Sadly, however, uninterrupted time blocks are not what life doles out today to any of us with regularity. Samuel R. Delany block sunday morning I still believe pattern fascinates on its own. And three-sevenths of a pattern, or even a smaller fragment, can fascinate still more--get us really hunkering down, trying to tease out the whole of the figure in the carpet. Samuel R. Delany three trying believe 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 teenage children school
