Top 10 Samuel R. Delany Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Samuel R. Delany Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I think of myself as someone who thinks largely through

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
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
I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.
Samuel R. Delany
The reason for privacy is not so that people will not know you go to the bathroom. It’s to allow certain things to go on that you don’t want other people to know about, when all is said and done. But the things I don’t want other people to know about are not my sex life.
Samuel R. Delany
Linguistics is very much a science. It’s a human science, one of the human sciences. And it’s one of the more interesting human sciences.
Samuel R. Delany
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
All too often, when creative people pick out someone else’s creative work as an inspiration, what they end up with is very, very far from the original.
Samuel R. Delany
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
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
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