M. John Harrison Quotes

#1. Perception of a state is not the state.

M. John Harrison

#2. Writing's like gambling. Unpredictable and sporadic successes make you more addicted, not less.

M. John Harrison

#3. Identity is not negotiable. An identity you have achieved by agreement is always a prison.

M. John Harrison

#4. The worst thing in the world is to be inside yourself, you don't even want to be rescued.

M. John Harrison

#5. In the morning
'When the world looks promising again despite what we know about it'
...

M. John Harrison

#6. As they moved from exhibit to exhibit like reluctant tourists in some artist's studio, Buffin sat on a stool with his limbs tense. He was like an exhibit himself in the direct odd light filtering through the whitish panes, legs wound tensely round one another, his face like an apologetic bag.

M. John Harrison

#7. I think it's undignified to read for the purposes of escape ... . If you read for escape you will never try to change your life, or anyone else's. It's a politically barren act, if nothing else. The overuse of imaginative fiction enables people to avoid the knowledge that they are actually alive.

M. John Harrison

#8. Everyone loves a mysterious country.

M. John Harrison

#9. Manufacture dooms in your head and you will go mad. Reality is incontravertible. Also, it will not be anticipated.

M. John Harrison

#10. It's 2444. We're all someone.

M. John Harrison

#11. Happiness and beauty are the worst things you can have in a life, because you never forget them. They go on and on ambushing you, presumably until you die.

M. John Harrison

#12. A good ground rule for writing in any genre is, start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide - then write that.

M. John Harrison

#13. Write something about me then,' he said when I came back. He grinned. 'Go on! Now! I bet you can!'
'I don't do portraits, Choe.'
The lies liberated from this statement skittered off into infinity like images between two mirrors.

M. John Harrison

#14. He was lonely; I wanted to help, of course, but not from so intimate a distance; and lately our meetings had become memorable as a series of comically protracted farewells on station platforms and embarrassed, hasty protestations of friendship made through the windows of departing taxicabs.

M. John Harrison

#15. I've never been to the Himalayas, and I'm not really interested in them. I'm more interested in a dirty old quarry in Lancashire, and by god, they can be dirty.

M. John Harrison

#16. ... there is endless despair at the centre of every narcissistic self-portrait.

M. John Harrison

#17. Stories pass the experienced world back and forth between them as a metaphor, until it is worn out. Only then do we realize that meaning is an act. We must repossess it, instant to instant in our lives.

M. John Harrison

#18. At Birkin Grif's left, his seat insecure on a scruffy packhorse, Theomeris Glyn, his only armour a steel-stressed leather cap, grumbled at the cold and the earliness of the hour, and cursed the flint hearts of city girls.

M. John Harrison