Samuel R. Delany

“Do you follow the wrestling? Most people think it's illegal, but you can watch it there. Ruby and Python are on display this evening.”

“When I was packing those, I caught myself taking all the important, profound, and indispensable titles I could – nearly filled the box. But one of the more eccentric librarians at the internment compound I’d gotten permission to riffle had put up a whole shelf full of cubes of women writers or texts about women. She was convinced nobody could be truly educated unless they’d read them – though nobody I ever met had, except her, maybe. […]”

“You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city...you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't even know were there. Everything changes.”

“The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.”

“Because feelings, emotional and physical, are so foregrounded in sexual encounters, the orgy is soon the most social of human interchanges, where awareness and communication, whether verbal or no, hold all together or sunder it.”

“From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.”

“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.”

“Those moments when we learn that mothers rage and fathers kill, that friends betray and authority is fallible, or that our own blank, innocent ignorance can destroy the pure, the good, and the loved are moments the very memory of which constitutes the beginning of a strategy to live in a world where such horrors exist.”

“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.”

“I'm not about either entertaining or instructing. The entertaining and instructing are secondary fallout from the fundamental thing, which is basically to create an aesthetic object.”