Home > Work > Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics--A Collection of Written Interviews
1 " And prose is made of sentences. Oh, I’ve always been a bathroom dictionary browswer. Still—“In the beginning was the word . . .”? I suppose poets have to feel that way. But for me, the word’s a degenerate sentence, a fragmentary utterance, something incomplete. Mollying along, lonesome Mrs. Masters asks, “Why aren’t there any decent words?” Well, no word is decent by itself; and less than a dozen indecent—shit, fuck, and the like working the way they do because when they’re blurted by counter women, construction workers, or traffic-bound drivers, they’ve got a clear capital at one end and an exclamation point at the other, so that the words alone (in the dictionary, say, or askew on the stall wall) are homonymous with the indecent expletive—which is a sentence. Declare “Sputum! "
― Samuel R. Delany , Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics--A Collection of Written Interviews
