Samuel R. Delany

They did not realize that reality must prove itself again and again to questioners, and that it is the fantasy which goes on without contradiction, without having to prove itself under logical rigour. The idea of asking questions was almost impossible; but only almost.

Look, if he’s alive, there’s nothing we have to do about it. If he’s dead, there’s nothing we can do.

What are you doing here?" I asked at last.
"Probably the same thing you are."
"What's that?"
She looked serious. "Why don't you tell me?"
I went back to my knife. "Sharpening my machete."
"I'm sharpening my mind," she said. "There is something to be done that will require an edge on both.

Difference is the foundation of those buildings, the pilings beneath the docks, tangled in the roots of the trees. Half the place was built on it. The other half couldn’t live without it. But to talk about it in public reveals you to be ill-mannered and vulgar.

I believe art is a wholly formal enterprise, encompassing almost all the tenets that the nineteenth century spoke of as l’art pour l’art, tenets which have made twentieth century’s experimentation possible. (What postmodern doesn’t?)

to wound the autumnal city.
So howled out for the world to give him a name.
The in-dark answered with wind.

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

One cannot truly trace the course of a life in a thousand pages. Let us have the reticence here not to attempt it in a thousand words.

I have always tried to do what was right. But long ago I learned that being right was a brutal, cruel, and thankless position. Oh—I wish I could see you more clearly! If you pursue yourself in that manner, your friends will criticize you for it, call you a fool—as I have called you. But then, with only a few unhappy moments, I’ve always considered myself your friend. The things that made you hate me, I only did to shock you, to wake you up, to make you become yourself…

But it's always intriguing to discover the ways in which desire fuels the systems of the world.

Appearances are signs of possibilities, at least when one remembers that what appears may be a sign by masking as easily as by manifesting.

We moved toward that precipice with a motion as inexorable as that with which time takes us toward our death.

I must remember my own origins. Once I was as ignorant as you; I swear, though, I can’t remember when.

He was learning that power—the great power that shattered lives and twisted the course of nations—was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From any distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge, yet as you approached it, it seemed to recede before you. Finally, when common sense said you were at its very center, it still seemed just as far away, only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it.

Don’t romanticize science fiction. One of the questions I have been asked so many times I’ve forgotten what my stock answer to it is, “Since science fiction is a marginal form of writing, do you think it makes it easier to deal with marginal people?” To which the answer is, “No.” Why should it be any easier? Dealing with the marginal is always a matter of dealing with the marginal. If anything, science fiction as a marginal genre is more rigid, far more rigid than literature…