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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Art and crime challenge societal norms and inspire change.
This quote emphasizes the role of artists and criminals as pivotal forces in society, arguing that both challenge accepted values and provoke necessary transformation. By questioning and often confronting societal norms, they stimulate dialogue and reflection, making them essential to societal evolution.
Themes
ArtCrimeSocietyChangeValues
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on societal impacts of creativity, this quote can highlight the transformative power of art.
More from Samuel R. Delany
All quotes →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
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
Speak to me...be eloquent, be brilliant for me. Improvise! Rhapsodize!... I ask for cream and you give me milk and water... Please gather your dreams together into words. - Roxanne, Cyrano de Bergerac
Edmond RostandRead
This is the gift all writers seek-to write language that incandesces yet does not melt.
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The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship
Kinky FriedmanRead
I can’t stand these damn shows on museum walls with neat little frames, where you look at the images as if they were pieces of art. I want them to be pieces of life!
W. Eugene SmithRead
Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing -to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.
Ralph Waldo EmersonRead
If you've been fortunate enough to do a film that appeals to the entire family, that's the audience that's probably going to come back to you in something else.
Julie AndrewsRead