Samuel R. Delany Quotes

What makes a boy interesting does not make a man interesting.

Life is hard for everyone, and we must not take credit ourselves for the little that others can do with theirs. Rather look instead to whom we can give credit, if not thanks, for what little we have been able to do with our own.

But that kind has not a true word in him. I wouldn’t be surprised if everything he said were a lie. Such as he lies as he breathes. Truth is something he’s never even learned to speak.

Could it be, he wondered, he’d only thought he’d seen what he’d seen because of his own desires, researches, expectations?

I’m a public man, my princess. That means my only meaning is the web of signs I publicly inhabit.

Life, I sometimes think—like dreams, like stories, like plans, even like lies if you will—is to be pondered on, interpreted, interrogated: but you had best not try to change it too radically in the middle, or you risk never finding its secret.

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

Young writers take that most communal object, language, and perform on it that most individual act, creation.

What references she’d overheard were all oblique enough so that, without knowing what they referred to, she’d have no way to interpret them and so hadn’t really heard them at all.

What real power can buy, of course, is anonymity.

Myself, I suspect it’s a kind of madness: the madness that makes one repeat whatever one is trained to repeat.

It's a map of a non-existent coast under an imaginary constellation on an impossible sky in—" he grunted, twisting something—"the middle of a ring of meaningless numbers. That's why it's powerful. That's why it's magic.

The problem you have put me will remain a problem till the globe of the world and the globe of the sun meet in their common center and the one consumes the other. This answer I have proposed, however, humanity will know and forget, know and forget, know and forget again. And that knowing and forgetting will approximate the peaks and depths of civilization as closely as the quotient of your tosses approximates that number which, rationally, we know is not there.

Pryn felt the reckless freedom of assertion.

To write for others," she thought, "it seems one must be a spy—or a teller of tales.