“The reason for privacy is not so that people will not know you go to t...” — Samuel R. Delany Quote

The reason for privacy is not so that people will not know you go to the bathroom. It's to allow certain things to go on that you don't want other people to know about, when all is said and done. But the things I don't want other people to know about are not my sex life.

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.

I grew up in Harlem, a block away from what was then the most crowded block in New York City, according to the 1950 census. Something like ten thousand people lived in one city block.

One of the more depressing things about reading your fiction 25 years later, or 10 years later, is you realize the only things going on are things you made go on. Strange and interesting and new and wonderful things don't happen. It's the book you wrote; that's all.

Read everything you can get your hands on: Programme your mind to read all the time and everywhere - even in the bathroom; skim through the lines printed on the back of shampoo bottles and sanitary napkin packets.

I thought I was going to die. Seriously. I had a 24-hour flu and then I had a stomach virus. I couldn't get out of my bed without going to the bathroom.

True story - I had index cards; I would write things on them and post them on the mirror in the bathroom. And I would speak it. Because you have to speak life. You have to speak what you want. You have to watch what you say because it's power in your tongue.

Is that bad? Detachment in the sense that I can't be going to every party, showing my face, talking to the press and telling them what I am wearing to the bathroom or where I eat. I would rather see a purpose to that.