Top 94 Harlan Ellison Quotes
#1. Don't start an argument with somebody who has a microphone when you don't. They'll make you look like chopped liver.
Harlan Ellison
#3. The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.
Harlan Ellison
#4. She thinks we were all killed when they made the Great Sweep, but I escaped in the mud.
Harlan Ellison
#5. I am not one of these people who instantly takes umbrage when he's corrected or - I love being corrected.
Harlan Ellison
#6. They change scapegoats at the networks more regularly than some people change socks.
Harlan Ellison
#7. At core, no matter how kindly may be your thoughts of the human race, there are times when all you want to do is crumple it up and either set fire to it, or use it to pad the floor of a bird cage.
Big bird cage.
Really big bird.
Harlan Ellison
#8. There is Harlan Ellison the human being, who takes a crap a couple of times a day, and who farts, and who eats chicken croquettes, if I can find them. And then there is the writer, this writer-person, who is a much finer person than I. Much more orderly, much more meaningful. Worthier, than I [am].
Harlan Ellison
#9. Posing the question: does the god of love use underarm deodorant, vaginal spray and fluoride toothpaste?
Harlan Ellison
#11. Get a day job, make your money from that, and write to please yourself.
Harlan Ellison
#12. He was furious. He wouldn't let me bury them. It didn't matter. There was no way to dig up the deckplates. He dried up the snow. He brought the night. He roared and sent locusts. It didn't do a thing; they stayed dead. I'd had him.
Harlan Ellison
#13. Repent, Harlequin," said the Ticktock Man. "Get stuffed," the Harlequin replied.
Harlan Ellison
#14. Science fiction used to be a dangerous literature. Now, it is a very commercial genre, and whatever dangers might still lurk within seem to have been safely sanitized for the marketplace. The real crime is that the lobotomy has been self performed. I
Harlan Ellison
#16. I'm nothing. Nothing at all without writing. Without truth, my truth, the only truth I know, it's all a gambol in the pasture without rhythm or sense.
Harlan Ellison
#18. They are stories I wrote because my friends are gone, a lot of them, and if you can't be angry about it, how the hell much did you care to begin with?
Harlan Ellison
#19. There in the midst of the Amazon Jungle, Simon Haskell has cobbled up for himself a replica of an Art Deco salon.
Harlan Ellison
#20. Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.
Harlan Ellison
#21. I am responsible for myself. I am exactly who I eventually wanted myself to be, I guess, without consciously knowing what I wanted me to be.
Harlan Ellison
#22. I made as many mistakes as anybody else. I sound as if I'm an egomaniac, and I suppose in some ways I'm filled with hubris because I know how good I am at certain things. But other things, I can't do at all. I can't draw.
Harlan Ellison
#23. The city lay cool and dim beneath a vaulting sky of high-scudding gray clouds. A gray shroud that covered the corpses of buildings, stiff in brick-and-steel rigor mortis, pale in their eternity of sooty death.
Harlan Ellison
#24. I think [religion] is presumptuous and I think it is silly, because it makes you believe that you are less than what you can be. As long as you can blame everything on some unseen deity, you don't ever have to be responsible for your own behavior.
Harlan Ellison
#25. Any writer who pretends to a disaffection for recognition, I think they're being duplicitous.
Harlan Ellison
#27. For the first time we have a weapon that nobody has used for thirty years. This gives me great hope for the human race.
Harlan Ellison
#28. Because the chief commodity a writer has to sell is his courage. And if he has none, he is more than a coward. He is a sellout and a fink and a heretic, because writing is a holy chore.
Harlan Ellison
#29. K is for "Kenghis Khan"; He was a very nice person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere.
Harlan Ellison
#30. I hate when a director says to me 'Here's how I envision this scene' ... excuse me? It's right here in the script - I 'envisioned' it FOR you. Do what I wrote. If you want to 'envision', you should become a writer. Where the fuck were you when the page was blank?
Harlan Ellison
#31. You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.
Harlan Ellison
#32. You show me someone who'll eat lima beans without being at gunpoint, I'll show you a pervert!
Harlan Ellison
#33. I don't mind you thinking I'm stupid, but don't talk to me like I'm stupid
Harlan Ellison
#34. The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.
Harlan Ellison
#36. The world is turning into a cesspool of imbeciles.
Harlan Ellison
#37. If you put your hand in my pocket, you'll drag back six inches of bloody stump.
Harlan Ellison
#38. I look upon those who assure me they had a 'happy childhood' as either pathological liars, or pariahs.
Harlan Ellison
#41. The real story of our times is seldom told in the horse-puckey-filled memoirs of dopey, self-serving presidents or generals, but in the outrageous, demented lives of guys like Lenny Bruce, Giordano Bruno, Scott Fitzgerald - and Paul Krassner. The burrs under society's saddle. The pains in the ass.
Harlan Ellison
#42. I never send a story off until I have read it aloud to at least two or three people. Because when I read - and I don't need their criticism, what I need is my own - when I read it aloud, there is a flow, there is a poetry to it.
Harlan Ellison
#43. In these days of widespread illiteracy, functional illiteracy ... anything that keeps people stupid is a felony.
Harlan Ellison
#44. What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads ... The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better is my work.
Harlan Ellison
#45. I refuse to write the same story twice. I keep experimenting. I keep learning how to work. I've been at it pretty much 50 years, and I'm now beginning to learn how to do the job well.
Harlan Ellison
#46. I cannot pay attention to what people say about my work. For me, personally, I am just this shards-and-ashes human being, who really gets upset when someone says something bad about me. If it's true, I cop to it. If I have any good qualities, it's that.
Harlan Ellison
#47. And we passed through the cavern of rats.
And we passed through the path of boiling steam.
And we passed through the country of the blind.
And we passed through the slough of despond.
And we passed through the vale of tears.
And we came, finally, to the ice caverns.
Harlan Ellison
#49. The machine masturbated and we had to take it or die.
Harlan Ellison
#50. (Awesome is the word one uses for Eleanor Roosevelt, Mt. Kilimanjaro, and pitching a no-hit no-run ballgame. Not available for the crappy cheese quesadilla you had this afternoon, nor for anybody who Dances with the Stars. With or without a wooden leg.)
Harlan Ellison
#51. You can live in your dreams, but only if you are worthy of them.
Harlan Ellison
#52. Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.
Harlan Ellison
#53. Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory
Harlan Ellison
#54. There is only one real evil in the world: mediocrity.
Harlan Ellison
#55. Possibly the only dismaying aspect of excellence is that it makes living in a world of mediocrity an ongoing prospect of living hell.
Harlan Ellison
#56. The act of writing means you wish to communicate. Whether you're writing a memoir for yourself you put in a drawer, or you write a poem and you send it to a little magazine, or you write for publication, it always means - the form follows function.
Harlan Ellison
#57. We talked across each other, our conversation at right angles, only meeting in the intersections of silence at story's end.
Harlan Ellison
#58. People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.
Harlan Ellison
#60. I can't picture in my mind three hundred and sixty thousand dollars ... When I think of it, all I can see in my mind is a big nickel.
Harlan Ellison
#61. Humor should not be dissected because nothing lives through dissection.
Harlan Ellison
#62. The more you know, the more unflinchingly you deny casual beliefs and Accepted Wisdom when it flies in the face of reality, the more carefully you observe the world and its people around you, the better chance you have of writing something meaningful and well-crafted.
Harlan Ellison
#64. I usually say I write for the smartest, cleverest, wittiest audience I know, and that's me.
Harlan Ellison
#65. You're a writer. And that's something better than being a millionaire. Because it's something holy.
Harlan Ellison
#66. Style, like taste, is resistant to lucid definition; however, both, as living things should be, are subject to constant change.
Harlan Ellison
#67. Ellison's Theorem: the further right your position, the less telling your satire. A corollary of which is that you can't lampoon anywhere near where you stand, because you'd annihilate your own troops.
Harlan Ellison
#68. I think love and sex are separate and only vaguely similar. Like the word bear and the word bare. You can get in trouble mistaking one for the other.
Harlan Ellison
#69. There are some people who just shouldn't be allowed to fool around with love.
Harlan Ellison
#70. Then he said the truest thing about their relationship. He said, We didn't really fall in love. What we did was collide at the intersection of your life and mine.
Harlan Ellison
#71. I was the green monkey, the pariah. And I had no friends. Not just a few friends, or one good friend, or grudging acceptance by other misfits and outcasts. I was alone. All stinking alone, without even an imaginary playmate.
Harlan Ellison
#72. When you're a writer, you have to have the passion and the skill and the craft. It's not just enough to have the passion. You've gotta have all three.
Harlan Ellison
#73. The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility; that is my burden. And even I grow tired.
Harlan Ellison
#74. I see all. I hear all. I know all. And I spend a great deal of time in the bathroom.
Harlan Ellison
#75. If one is unable to buy Courvoisier, one should forcibly restrain oneself from serving strawberries Romanoff for dessert.
Harlan Ellison
#76. People don't die from the old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that's Progress, isn't it? Isn't it?
Harlan Ellison
#77. when we lose our commitment to accuracy, honesty, and justice, we lose our ability to make a difference, because we also lose our vision of what is possible. Harlan
Harlan Ellison
#78. Thus, from admiration of one wise and innocent child, and from a misheard remark, the process that not even Aristotle could codify was triggered.
Where do you get your ideas?
I purposely mishear things.
Harlan Ellison
#79. It is a love/hate relationship I have with the human race. I am an elitist, and I feel that my responsibility is to drag the human race along with me, that I will never pander to, or speak down to, or play the safe game.
Harlan Ellison
#80. Writing a novel is like going a great distance to take a small shit.
Harlan Ellison
#81. The solitary creator, dreaming his or her dream, unaided, seems to me to be the only artist we can trust.
Harlan Ellison
#82. I will use big words from time to time, the meanings of which I may only vaguely perceive, in hopes such cupidity will send you scampering to your dictionary: I will call such behavior 'public service'.
Harlan Ellison
#83. I hate being wrong, but I love it when I'm set straight.
Harlan Ellison
#84. If there was a sweet Jesus and if there was a God, the God was AM.
Harlan Ellison
#85. They minute people fall in love they become liars.
Harlan Ellison
#86. I will live to piss in the open mouths or the open graves of my enemies, whichever comes first.
Harlan Ellison
#87. A writer who writes more than he reads is an amateur.
Harlan Ellison
#88. In my ugly, elitist opinion we are not all entitled to voice our opinions, we are entitled to pass along our informed opinions.
Harlan Ellison
#89. Gods can do anything. They fear nothing: they are gods. There is one rule, one Seal of Solomon that can confound a god, and to which all gods pay service, to the letter: when belief in a god dies, the god dies.
Harlan Ellison
#90. When I leave here, will this shop vanish the way they do in the stories?" "I'm afraid so, yes." "Why do they always do that?" The old man sighed. "You know, you're the first one who ever asked me that." But
Harlan Ellison
#91. Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.
Harlan Ellison
#92. [On love:] I have no respect for anyone who says they've given up, or that they're not looking or that they're tired. That is to abrogate one's responsibility as a human being.
Harlan Ellison
#93. If you let the image of the messenger get in the way of whatever message there may be, however large or small, that's your problem, not his.
Harlan Ellison
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