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 Read Quote
It looks like the writer is telling you a story. What the writer is actually doing, however, is using words to evoke a series of micromemories from your own experience that inmix, join, and connect in your mind in an order the writer controls, so that, in effect, you have a sustained memory of something that never happened to you. Samuel R. Delany Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
I think a 23-page ordinary comic is an investment for the artist, but if you’re doing something 60 to 104 pages, that’s a really big investment for an artist. So unless you’ve got someone who wants to pay you while you’re doing it or up front, it’s kind hard to get someone to do that with you, unless you’re the artist yourself. Samuel R. Delany Read Quote
I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently. Samuel R. Delany Read Quote
