American - Author | April 1, 1942 -
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
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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.
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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.
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A number of things in 'Dhalgren' are just meant to function as mysteries. They're mysteries when the book begins, and they're mysteries when the book ends.
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The idea that certain things in life - and in the universe - don't yield up their secrets is something that requires a slightly more mature reader to accept.
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'Dhalgren' is the kind of book in which you can look for pretty much anything you want. I tried to put as much into it as I could at the time.
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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.
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From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.
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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.
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Science fiction isn't just thinking about the world out there. It's also thinking about how that world might be - a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they're going to change the world we live in, they - and all of us - have to be able to think about a world that works differently.
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I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.
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I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently.
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