Samuel R. Delany

Quotes

1. Oh, I cannot tell you how the notion of eternity bores me—not to mention all the silly stories we are always making up to render the idea palatable!

   p. 202

2. 

   I felt, and still feel, that it is important for fantasy to have a grasp of the complexity of fact, if not of factual content.

   p. 372

3. 

   But as soon as any of us dies, there is only the monster left. What I had been pursuing was not Belham but the monster called Belham. And what my whole journey had taught me was precisely what sort of monster it was: it was made, as all such monsters are, of contradiction, supposition, miscalculation, impossibility, and ignorance.

   p. 302

4. 

   The audience’s performance is always more or less stochastic.

   p. 336

5. 

   The artist’s performance is always more or less aleatory.

   p. 334

6. 

   Yes, I learned about monsters on that trip. And I learned about them in these encounters afterward:

   First, monsters are real.

   Second, they are us.

   p. 318

7. 

   Oh, I assure you—I’m only a little outlaw. Don’t fear me, friend. I never broke any big laws. I just forget and do what I want sometimes, and discover it wasn’t what someone else wanted me to do.

   p. 96

8. 

   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?)

   p. 273

9. 

   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…

   p. 203

10. 

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

    p. 348

11. 

    Origins are always constructs, always contouring ideological agendas.

    p. 368

12. 

    The deconstructionists have led off this set of new readings most energetically by asking of certain texts: “What do they have to say that specifically undermines and subverts their own ideological array?” As energetic as the deconstructionist foray has been, we must remember that there are still going to be many texts for which we can expect the answer: “Not much.”

    p. 380