Top 120 Samuel R. Delany Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.”

— Samuel R. Delany

3. “There is a sense of decency that’s like a barometer to a man’s or a country’s health.”

— Samuel R. Delany

4. “Some people’s information is other people’s misinformation and even disinformation. That is pretty much the contemporary condition.”

— Samuel R. Delany

5. “Suggestion is a literary strategy.”

— Samuel R. Delany

6. “I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what’s already been articulated.”

— Samuel R. Delany

7. “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.”

— Samuel R. Delany

8. “The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts, but that it generates a way of thinking.”

— Samuel R. Delany

9. “I was a kid who liked art and theater and dance and music, but if you lived in Harlem, high culture was somewhere else, and it wasn’t black.”

— Samuel R. Delany

10. “I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on.”

— Samuel R. Delany

11. “Apocalypse has come and gone. We’re just grubbing in the ashes.”

— Samuel R. Delany

12. “Ambition like a liquid ruby stains.”

— Samuel R. Delany

13. “Ah, well, during the Middle Ages, religion was often able to redeem art. Today, however, art is about the only thing that can redeem religion, and the clerics will never forgive us for that.”

— Samuel R. Delany

14. “It is not that love sometimes makes mistakes, but that it is, essentially, a mistake. We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfections on to another person. One day the phantasmagoria vanishes, and with it love dies.”

— Samuel R. Delany

15. “The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.”

— Samuel R. Delany

16. “You are trapped in that bright moment where you learned your doom.”

— Samuel R. Delany

17. “Babes, I am so bored here that I don’t think, since I’ve come, I’ve ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.”

— Samuel R. Delany

18. “Sometimes you want to say things, and you’re missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That’s how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn’t exist.”

— Samuel R. Delany

19. “And his left nipple was centimetres above my right eye. I wanted to lean my head back and lick it – not from desire but from that idiocy always there to subvert desire and render it ludicrous. Our human heat was a third creature bevelling between us.”

— Samuel R. Delany

20. “But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They’re both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it.”

— Samuel R. Delany

21. “There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky’s variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful.”

— Samuel R. Delany

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

— Samuel R. Delany

23. “I am limited, finite, and fixed. I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on. I commend myself up to what is greater than I, and try to be good.”

— Samuel R. Delany

24. “The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear.”

— Samuel R. Delany

25. “There are times when you must walk by yourself because it hurts so much to be alone.”

— Samuel R. Delany

26. “Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language.”

— Samuel R. Delany

27. “If you are angle, I am complement. If you are circle, I am circumscribed.”

— Samuel R. Delany

28. “Spending practically every minute of your day on pure survival is an absolutely boring life.”

— Samuel R. Delany

29. “There are three types of actions : purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters, to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three.”

— Samuel R. Delany

30. “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.”

— Samuel R. Delany

31. “You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can’t express, and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn’t hurt any more: that’s my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.”

— Samuel R. Delany

32. “Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader’s mind – vividly, forcefully...”

— Samuel R. Delany

33. “You have to grow all the time,” I said. “Not necessarily get bigger. But inside your head you have to grow, kid-boy. For us human-type people that’s what’s important. And that kind of growing never stops. At least it shouldn’t. You can grow, kid-boy; or you can die. That’s the choice you’ve got, and it goes on all of your life.”

— Samuel R. Delany

34. “Honesty is the best policy ; a policy is, after all, a strategy for living in the polis in the city...”

— Samuel R. Delany

35. “I heard Bellona was where it was at. It must be, now. I’m here.”

— Samuel R. Delany

36. “You do not need an identity to become yourself; you need an identity to become -like- someone else.”

— Samuel R. Delany

37. “Desire isn’t appeased by its object, only irritated into something more than desire that can join with the stars to inform the chaotic heavens with sense.”

— Samuel R. Delany

38. “The problem isn’t to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.”

— Samuel R. Delany

39. “If you are to stay in the good graces of the powerful, you had best, however unobtrusively, please the servants of the powerful.”

— Samuel R. Delany

40. “I was born,” the Mouse said. “I must die. I am suffering. Help me. There, I just wrote your book for you.”

— Samuel R. Delany

41. “The truth is always multiplex.”

— Samuel R. Delany

42. “Like contemporary poetry, philosophy is one of those things, especially at the beginning stages, most people would rather do than study which is why most of what gets done is so impoverished.”

— Samuel R. Delany

43. “I pass beneath a fixed white line of trees where dry leaves lie for footsteps to dismember. They crackle with a muted sound like fear. That and the wind are all that I can hear. I ask cold air, “What is the word that frees?” The wind says, “Change,” and the white sun, “Remember.”

— Samuel R. Delany

44. “Neurotics proceed with delusions of grandeur. Napoleon Bonaparte take the lead. Jesus Christ bring up the rear.”

— Samuel R. Delany

45. “Poetry is what is avoided as it is surrounded by translation.”

— Samuel R. Delany

46. “You can program a computer to make mistakes, and you do it not by crossing wires, but by manipulating the ‘language’ you teach it to ‘think’ in.”

— Samuel R. Delany

47. “It’s a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator’s experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist’s.”

— Samuel R. Delany

48. “You can be bored with anything if you try hard enough.”

— Samuel R. Delany

49. “Clouds out of control decoct anticipation. What use can any of us have for two moons? The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen.”

— Samuel R. Delany

50. “Topologically, men and women are identical. Some things are just larger and more developed in one than the other and positioned differently.”

— Samuel R. Delany