The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the societyβs values, can force it to change.
Samuel R. DelanyRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Fiction immerses us in experiences akin to memories rather than real events.
In this quote, Samuel R. Delany emphasizes that while reading fiction can deeply engage us and evoke strong emotions, the experiences we gain from it are not the same as those derived from real-life occurrences. Instead, they resemble memories, highlighting the unique way that stories shape our thoughts and feelings through imaginative engagement rather than direct experience.
Themes
FictionMemoryExperienceReadingStories
In practice
Example use cases
In a book club discussion about the impact of literature.
More from Samuel R. Delany
All quotes βHow we treat our invalids - our mad, our physically or mentally compromised family members - does tell you something about who we are politically, historically, culturally.
Samuel R. DelanyRead
It is a magic book. Words mean things. When you put them together they speak. Yes, sometimes they flatten out and nothing they say is real, and that is one kind of magic. But sometimes a vision will rip up from them and shriek and clank wings clear as the sweat smudge on the paper under your thumb. And that is another kind.
Samuel R. DelanyRead
The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing. ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words.
Samuel R. DelanyRead
I spend a lot of time thinking, if not daydreaming. People think of me as a genre writer, and a genre writer is supposed to be prolific. Since that's how people perceive me, they have to say I'm prolific. But I don't find that either complimentary or accurate.
Samuel R. DelanyRead
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.
Samuel R. DelanyRead
Similar quotes
I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
Barbara KingsolverRead
All told, she owned fourteen books, but she saw her story as being made up predominantly of ten of them. Of those ten, six were stolen, one showed up at the kitchen table, two were made for her by a hidden Jew, and one was delivered by a soft, yellow-dressed afternoon.
Markus ZusakRead
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine... But from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine.
Jane AustenRead
Throughout my career, when I have been rejected, there was sometimes subtext, and it was this: People will not read your work because these are not universal stories.
Jesmyn WardRead
Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?
Roland BarthesRead
Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.
Richard FordRead