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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses the transformative power of art as a means to articulate unexpressed emotions and thoughts.
In this quote, Samuel R. Delany conveys the role of a poet or artist as someone who listens to the struggles of others in communicating their feelings and ideas. By refining these raw emotions into art—through poetry—he transforms their pain and confusion into something beautiful and resonant, bridging the gap between unexpressed thoughts and expression, ultimately providing a voice for those who feel unheard.
Themes
ArtPoetryExpressionEmotionsCreativity
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech on creativity, you might quote this to emphasize the role of artists in translating complex feelings into art.
More from Samuel R. Delany
All quotes →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. 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
You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair - the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.
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Hollywood is a very volatile place where artists come in, and they essentially say they want to belong. It's incredibly vulnerable to be an actor and also get criticism at a young age when you're formulating who you are. We've seen a lot of people fall victim to that, and it's very unfortunate.
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I feel like my music has become a lot of things. It's hard to label the evolution, but I like there to be an evolution. I just like to paint with all different kinds of colors.
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There was a German philosopher who is very well known, his name was Immanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don’t have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don’t have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure.
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Most actors, if you ask them if they play guitar, they'll say they played guitar for 20 years, but what they really mean is they've owned a guitar for 20 years.
Oscar IsaacRead
People have always heard voices. Sometimes they're called shamans, sometimes they're called mad, and sometimes they're called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fiction writing is legal and not seen as pathology.
Ruth OzekiRead