A Quote by Samuel R. Delany

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. Delany

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Actual Experience Fiction However Itself Lose Memory Much Novel Occurrence Order Ourselves Readers Story

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Samuel R. Delany
American - Author
Born: April 1, 1942

However fiercely opposed one may be to the present order, an old respect for the idea of order itself often prevents people from distinguishing between order and those who stand for order, and leads them in practice to respect individuals under the pretext of respecting order itself.

Antonin Artaud

Honest people remember stories in the order of emotional prominence, but liars will recount a story in chronological order. Memory rarely works that way.

Pamela Meyer

I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.

Hermann Hesse

It looks like the writer is telling you a story. What the writer is actually doing, however, is using words to evoke a series of micromemories from your own experience that inmix, join, and connect in your mind in an order the writer controls, so that, in effect, you have a sustained memory of something that never happened to you.

Samuel R. Delany

Reading Tomato Red-the first Daniel Woodrell novel I came upon-was a transformative experience. It expanded my sense of the possibilities not only of crime fiction, but of fiction itself-of language, of storytelling. Time and again, his work just dazzles and humbles me. God bless Busted Flush for these glorious reissues. It's a service to readers everywhere, and a great gift.

Megan Abbott

[A] science fiction story is one which presupposes a technology, or an effect of technology, or a disturbance in the natural order, such as humanity, up to the time of writing, has not in actual fact, experienced.

Edmund Crispin

This fact was something I also learned from this first novel that I needed personal experience to invent, to fantasize, to create fiction, but at the same time I needed some distance, some perspective on this experience in order to feel free enough to manipulate it and to transform it into fiction. If the experience is very close, I feel inhibited. I have never been able to write fiction about something that has happened to me recently. If the closeness of the real reality, of living reality, is to have a persuasive effect on my imagination, I need a distance, a distance in time and in space.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Mostly the natural landscapes work as a sounding board for my characters, so they can understand themselves, and it acts as a mirror in which we readers see ourselves. The natural world is the place into which all my characters have to situate themselves in order to be who they really are, and that makes my rural fiction feel different from a lot of urban fiction.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

You have to hurt in order to know. Fall in order to grow. Lose in order to gain. Because most of life's lessons are learned through pain

Boonaa Mohammed

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion

We are so afraid of silence that we chase ourselves from one event to the next in order not to have to spend a moment alone with ourselves, in order not to have to look at ourselves in the mirror.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.

Isabel Allende

The aim of the poet is to inform or delight, or to combine together, in what he says, both pleasure and applicability to life. In instructing, be brief in what you say in order that your readers may grasp it quickly and retain it faithfully. Superfluous words simply spill out when the mind is already full. Fiction invented in order to please should remain close to reality.

Horace

My strips are not always funny, and they can be pretty grim at times, and I know I lose readers because of it, but I can't do anything about it - my work is very much connected to something I need to do in order to feel stable.

Lynda Barry

As sculptors chip away the stone in order to find the statue, writers chip away extraneous verbiage so readers can see the shape of an idea clearly. My gift is to see through the confusion, to bring order and simplicity to a story.

Leslie Parrish

It's true that I don't rearrange that much in the fiction, but I feel if you change even one name or the order of one event then you have to call it fiction or you get all the credits of non-fiction without paying the price.

Nicholson Baker

A Quote by Samuel R. Delany

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