"Why must we love where the lightning strikes, and not where we choose? "
— Theodore Sturgeon (E Pluribus Unicorn)

"The deep structure of the universe is pure consciousness."
— David Zindell (Neverness)

"There is nothing left to watch but fire and the night: circle within circle, light within light. Messages arrive in the net where discrete pulses cross. Parametal engines of joy and disaster give them wave and motion. We interpret and defeat their terms by terminus. The night? What of it. It is filled with bestial watchmen, trammeling the extremities and the interstices of the timeless city, portents fallen,
constellated deities plummeting in ash and smoke, roaming the apocryphal cities, the cities of speculation and reconstituted disorder, of insemination and incipience, swept round with the dark."
— Samuel R. Delany (Dhalgren)

"I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me."
— Michel Foucault

"Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art."
— Susan Sontag

"Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century. "
— J.G. Ballard

"In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom! "
— J.G. Ballard

"A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status -- all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing)."
— J.G. Ballard

"Nothing is real until you put it in the VCR."
— J.G. Ballard

"It was an excess of fantasy that killed the old United States, the whole Mickey Mouse and Marilyn thing, the most brilliant technologies devoted to trivia like instant cameras and space spectaculars that should have stayed in the pages of Science Fiction . . . some of the last Presidents of the U.S.A. seemed to have been recruited straight from Disneyland."
— J.G. Ballard (Hello America)

"Perhaps the future belongs to magic, and it's we women who control magic."
— J.G. Ballard (Rushing to Paradise)

"On bad days I talk to Death constantly, not about suicide because honestly that's not dramatic enough. Most of us love the stage and suicide is definitely your last performance and being addicted to the stage, suicide was never an option - plus people get to look you over and stare at your fatty bits and you can't cross your legs to give that flattering thigh angle and that's depressing. So we talk. She says things no one else seems to come up with, like let's have a hotdog and then it's like nothing's impossible.
She told me once there is a part of her in everyone, though Neil believes I'm more Delirium than Tori, and Death taught me to accept that, you know, wear your butterflies with pride. And when I do accept that, I know Death is somewhere inside of me. She was the kind of girl all the girls wanted to be, I believe, because of her acceptance of "what is." She keeps reminding me there is change in the "what is" but change cannot be made till you accept the "what is.""
— Tori Amos

"and if there is a way to find you, I will find you. but will you find me if Neil makes me a tree"
— Tori Amos (Tori Amos Boys for Pele)

"I was a young black man, light-skinned enough so that four out of five people who met me, of whatever race, assumed I was white.... I was a homosexual who now knew he could function heterosexually.

And I was a young writer whose early attempts had already gotten him a handful of prizes....

So, I thought, you are neither black nor white.

You are neither male nor female.

And you are that most ambiguous of citizens, the writer.

There was something at once very satisfying and very sad, placing myself at this pivotal suspension. It seemed, in the park at dawn, a kind of revelation--a kind of center, formed of a play of ambiguities, from which I might move in any direction. "
— Samuel R. Delany (The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village)

"I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute."
— Rebecca West

"I think quotes are very dangerous things."
— Kate Bush

"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. Delany (Empire Star)

"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. Delany (Equinox)

"The text contains no literary criticism. I wanted to describe books, not to be clever at their expense."
— Kenneth McLeish (Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide)

"They're in love. Fuck the war."
— Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)

"They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea."
— Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West)

"My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure."
— Gene Wolfe

"We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life--they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.
"
— Gene Wolfe (Shadow & Claw)

"Dear Leonard. To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours."
— Michael Cunningham (The Hours)

"The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear."
— Samuel R. Delany

"'The fantasy/reality confusion...it's just marvelous in her work. I mean, there, it's practically like what we do, the fantasy working as a sort of metalogic, with which she can solve real, aesthetic problems in the most incredible ways -- I was actually in a few of her productions last year, a sort of ersatz member of the company. But finally I just had to get out. Because when that fantasy seeps into the reality, she just becomes an incredibly ugly person. She feels she can distort anything that occurs for whatever purpose she wants. Whatever she feels, that's what is, as far as she's concerned. But then, I suppose...' Bron laughed at the ground, then looked up: they'd just left the Plaza -- 'that's the right we just fought a war to defend. But Audri, when someone abuses that right, it can make it pretty awful for the rest of us.'"
— Samuel R. Delany (Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia)

"You've blotted the rich form of desire from my life and left me only some vaguely eccentric behaviors that have grown up to integrate so much pleasure into the mundane world around me. What text could I write now? It's as though I cannot even remember what I once desired. All I can look for now, when I have the energy, is lost desire itself-- and I look for it by clearly inadequate means. At best such an account as I might write would read like the life of anyone else, with, now and again, a bizarre and interruptive incident, largely mysterious and completely demystified-- at least that's what it has become without the day-to-day, moment-to-moment web of wanting that you have unstrung from about my universe. Without it, all falls apart. In a single gesture you've turned me into the most ordinary of human creatures and at once left me an obsessive, pleasureless eccentric, trapped in a set of habits which no longer have reason because they no longer lead to reward. And if I had enough self-confidence, in the midst of this bland continual chaos into which you've shunted me, for hate, I should hate you. But I don't have it."
— Samuel R. Delany (Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand)

"Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs."
— Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)

"But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it.""
— Samuel R. Delany

"As my mother once said, 'The boys throw stones at the frog in jest. But the frogs die in earnest.""
— Joanna Russ (The Female Man)

"There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen."
— J.G. Ballard

""Driftglass," I said. "You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut-crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?"

"I know the Coca-Cola bottles."

"They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, changing their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral. When the pieces dry, they're milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again.""
— Samuel R. Delany (Driftglass)

"It is quite possible for a work of literature to operate as a war machine upon its epoch."
— Monique Wittig

"Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind---vividly, forcefully..."
— Samuel R. Delany (About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews)

"You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant."
— Harlan Ellison

"Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

"The expression "to write something down" suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it."
— William H. Gass

"Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love.
Love is not music.
Music is THE BEST."
— Frank Zappa

"We're plotting to steal time itself from you.... We're going to spike it to the floor as it slips by. And just as you come over to see why it's so still, we'll pull it out from under you--and send you spinning off around the galaxy's edge. We're planning to pluck all the best stars out of the sky and stuff them in our pockets... so that when we meet you once again and thrust our hands deep inside to hide our embarrassment, our fingertips will smart on them, as if they were desert grains, caught down in the seams, and we'll smile at you on your way to a glory that, for all our stellar thefts, we shall never be able to duplicate."
— Samuel R. Delany (Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand)

"To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time."
— Susan Sontag (On Photography)