Samuel R. Delany Quotes

All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.

Faith is the effort to believe what your common sense tells you is not true.

Oh. I see. People don't want to see what can't possibly exist.

Dreams don't come true. Dreams are true.

Maybe Santa Claus is real. Here's the problem: reality.

I think there's more real in the unreal than there is in the real.

You do not believe, you only believe that you believe.

Insanity is believing your hallucinations are real. Religion is believing that other peoples' hallucinations are real.

'Tell me one last thing,' said Harry. 'Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?' Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry's ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure. 'Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?'

Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

If all be a Dream, then he doth but dream that he makes the Question; and so it is not much matter that a waking Man should answer him.

We can't believe what we believe to be untrue, and we can't love what we believe to be unreal.

The truth is still the truth whether or not you believe it. Can we say the same about lies? No, lies only exist because we believe them. If we don't believe in lies, they simply disappear.

If ignorance were enough to make things not exist, the world would be more like a lot of people think it is. But it's not. And it's not.

Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.

That which is cannot be true.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.

The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.

The world is cynical and sarcastic, but that doesn't mean that that's always the truth.

It is fun to try figure out the things that really are real and the things that aren't.

I believe in everything. I believe that everything is an illusion, and everything is there to be believed in.