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. DelanyRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The primary purpose of art is to create beauty, while teaching or entertaining is a secondary outcome.
In this quote, Delany emphasizes that the true essence of art lies in the creation of an aesthetic object, suggesting that the role of an artist is to evoke beauty rather than merely to entertain or instruct. He asserts that the experiences of entertainment and instruction stem from the artistic creation itself, rather than being the main goal.
Themes
ArtAestheticCreationBeautyExpression
In practice
Example use cases
During an art exhibition opening, this quote could be shared to express the philosophy behind the pieces displayed.
More from Samuel R. Delany
All quotes βThe 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
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.
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
Similar quotes
The tea ceremony requires years of training and practice ... yet the whole of this art, as to its detail, signifies no more than the making and serving of a cup of tea. The supremely important matter is that the act be performed in the most perfect, most polite, most graceful, most charming manner possible.
Lafcadio HearnRead
I like silence. Aesthetically, I feel strangled by the fast cutting and a wall of sound. And I think showing black people thinking onscreen is radical.
Ava DuvernayRead
I am scared; I don't know what is going to happen to me. What was the point of working so hard and of being talented, to be rewarded like this? Never a penny, tormented all my life. It is horrible; one cannot imagine it.
Camille ClaudelRead
I was very influenced by movies; I was very influenced by a world that had a sense of dream.
Ralph LaurenRead
For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
Mary OliverRead
If you're writing a detective novel or horror or sci-fi, you want to expand or reinvigorate the genre in your own little way.
Colson WhiteheadRead