Quotes by Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany

‘You spin in the sky, the world spins under you, and you step from land to land, while we . . .’ She turned her head right, left, and her black hair curled and uncurled on the shoulder of her coat. ‘We have our dull, circled lives, bound in gravity, worshiping you!’

Hair

Land

Sky

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.

Ice

Pain

Poetry

Actions are interesting to watch. I learn about the actors. Their movements are emblems of the tensions in this internal landscape, which their actions resolve. About-to-act is an interesting state to experience, because I am conscious of just those tensions. Acting itself feels fairly dull; it not only resolves, it obliterates those tensions from my consciousness. Acting is only interesting as it leads to new tensions that, irrelevantly, cause me to act again.

Acting

Interesting

Watches

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.

Creative

Inspiration

People

As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.

Language

Renewal

Turns

Dictators during the entire history of this planet have used similar techniques. By not letting the people of their country know what conditions existed outside their boundaries, they could get the people to fight to stay in those conditions. It was the old adage: Convince a slave that he’s free , and he will fight to maintain his slavery .

Country

Fighting

People

Don’t go chattering to the stars if you’re going to do it with your eyes closed.

Eye

Ifs

Stars

Each of us, with money, gets further and further away from those moments where the hand pulls the beet root from the soil, shakes the fish from the net into the basket — not to mention the way it separates us from one another, so that when enough money comes between people, they lie apart like parts of a chicken hacked up for stewing.

Hands

Lying

Money

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.

Block

Morning

Sunday

Historically, I guess that’s how science fiction works: you start by using aliens to think the unthinkable and then, eventually, another writer, having grown a little more comfortable with the earlier notion, brings it into the human.

Fiction

Littles

Thinking

Follow The Behaviour University in order to get the greatest quotes from the greatest people of all time so that you can tap into your own greatness.

Acting

Ancient

Arguing

Art

Artist

Belief

Believe

Block

Boring

Cities

Country

Creative

Dark

Enamored

Energy

Exercise

Eye

Falling In Love

Fiction

Fighting

Garden

Hair

Hands

House

Humans

Ice

Ideas

Ifs

Imagination

Important

Inspiration

Intelligent

Interesting

Kids

Knows

Land

Language

Lazy

Linguistics

Littles

Loneliness

Lying

Magic

Men

Minutes

Missing

Mistake

Moments

Money

Morning

The Future Blueprint

Tool

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

Tool

The Autobiography

Tool

The Behaviour Diary

Tool

The Dating Diary

Tool

The Relationship Therapist

Tool

Quotes by Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany

‘You spin in the sky, the world spins under you, and you step from land to land, while we . . .’ She turned her head right, left, and her black hair curled and uncurled on the shoulder of her coat. ‘We have our dull, circled lives, bound in gravity, worshiping you!’

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.

As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.

Don’t go chattering to the stars if you’re going to do it with your eyes closed.

Historically, I guess that’s how science fiction works: you start by using aliens to think the unthinkable and then, eventually, another writer, having grown a little more comfortable with the earlier notion, brings it into the human.

Get Social with TBU

Topics by Samuel R. Delany

Popular Tools

The Future Blueprint

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

The Autobiography

The Behaviour Diary

The Dating Diary

The Relationship Therapist

Menu

Menu