Zitat des Tages von Samuel R. Delany:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.
I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently.
How we treat our invalids - our mad, our physically or mentally compromised family members - does tell you something about who we are politically, historically, culturally.
