Words of Samuel R. Delany

Random quotes from the works of Samuel R. Delany

[Words of Samuel R. Delany @QuoteDelany]

Do you remember when you joined X? I do! #MyXAnniversary

[Words of Samuel R. Delany @QuoteDelany]

Texts, however, endure.

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[Words of Samuel R. Delany @QuoteDelany]

She stood up, two dozen feet down and away, wearing only shadows the moon dropped from the viney maple; moved, and the shadows moved on her.

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[Words of Samuel R. Delany @QuoteDelany]

Beyond a leafy arras, reflected moonlight flittered.

He rubbed his palms against denim. Where he was, was still. Somewhere else, wind whined.

The leaves winked.

#Literature #LiteraturePosts #Dhalgren #sciencefiction

[Words of Samuel R. Delany @QuoteDelany]

You've blotted the rich form of desire from my life and left me only some vaguely eccentric behaviors that have grown up to integrate so much pleasure into the mundane world around me. What text could I write now?

#LiteraturePosts #Literature #ScienceFiction #LGBTQ #gay

[Words of Samuel R. Delany @QuoteDelany]

Science fiction redescribes woman, redescribes man, and redescribes the universe in which they move. And every successful redescription is itself the triumph.

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[Words of Samuel R. Delany @QuoteDelany]

Indeed, whoever said that the purpose of science fiction is to entertain was modeling in different words the same phenomenon the Roman poet Horace was attempting to fix when he said the purpose of art is “to delight and to instruct.”

#sciencefiction #literatureposts #scifibooks

[Words of Samuel R. Delany @QuoteDelany]

I distrust the term “plot” (not to mention “theme” and “setting”) in discussions of writing: it (and they) refers to an effect a story produces in the reading.

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[Words of Samuel R. Delany @QuoteDelany]

Listen to the words that come out of your mouth; look at the words you put on paper. Decide with each whether or not you want it there.

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[Words of Samuel R. Delany @QuoteDelany]

“But how do I create a vivid character?” Look closely at what individualizes people; explore those moments when you are vividly aware of a personality. Explore the others when you cannot fathom a given person’s actions at all.

#writingtips #writing

[Words of Samuel R. Delany @QuoteDelany]

One of the things that an art work of that length does—Wagner’s Ring, Ray’s Pather Panchali (the whole trilogy), Syberberg’s Parsifal or Our Hitler, Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften, or Proust’s Recherche—is start the audience off in a state of non-expectation.

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[Words of Samuel R. Delany @QuoteDelany]

The young painter who has set about learning to paint “realistically” is often surprised that the eye must do the learning; the hand more or less takes care of itself.

#writing #WritingCommunity #writinglife #art #painting

[Words of Samuel R. Delany @QuoteDelany]

I was a young black man, light-skinned enough so that four out of five people who met me, of whatever race, assumed I was white.... I was a homosexual who now knew he could function heterosexually.

#lgbtqia

[Words of Samuel R. Delany @QuoteDelany]

The request to write about your own work—to comment on a collection of your own fictions, say—is, to most writers, an occasion for distractionary tactics.

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[Words of Samuel R. Delany @QuoteDelany]

Abstract thoughts in a blue room; Nominative, genitive, etative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, illative, instructive, abessive, adessive, inessive, essive, allative, translative, comitative.

#language #linguistics #sciencefiction #writing #writinglife

[Words of Samuel R. Delany @QuoteDelany]

With the electric pattern aflicker before him, Arnold remembered the many instances he had stood here, day and night, pondering time, fame, all the vanished chances (fewer than his books, really), death. . .

#FridayReads #Literature #WritingLife

[Words of Samuel R. Delany @QuoteDelany]

The thing to remember about characterization—direct characterization, in which you write about a person’s psychology and the specific things which have shaped it to its particular form—is that, in most stories, a little goes a long way.

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[Words of Samuel R. Delany @QuoteDelany]

#writing #literature #gertrudestein

[Words of Samuel R. Delany @QuoteDelany]

He walked down the blazing, alien street.

And the street sucked his boots.

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[Words of Samuel R. Delany @QuoteDelany]

There were no ideas without words, without writing, without the language to dramatize and stabilize them. Otherwise, there could be no poetry—

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