Harlan Ellison Quotes & Sayings

I intend to keep writing stories that piss people off, that tell the particular kind of truth I think is valid, that will make me feel more and more like a Writer of Stature, Which I honestly think I am, really, I mean it, I don't doubt it for a second dammit, so stop giggling! Stories that will make Dr Shedd sniff the air and make Lester smile as je thinks, The kid's coming along all right. — Harlan Ellison

If you put your hand in my pocket, you'll drag back six inches of bloody stump. — Harlan Ellison

Don't come back till you have him! the Ticktockman said, very quietly, very sincerely, extremely dangerously.
They used dogs. They used probes. They used cardioplate crossoffs. They used teepers. They used bribery. They used stiktytes. They used intimidation. They used torment. They used torture. They used finks. They used cops. They used search&seizure. They used fallaron. They used betterment incentive. They used fingerprints. They used the Bertillon system. They used cunning. They used guile. They used treachery. They used Raoul Mitgong, but he didn't help much. They used applied physics. They used techniques of criminology.
And what the hell: they caught him. — Harlan Ellison

Everybody has a talent, whether it's scrapbooking, or kite-flying, or brain surgery, or writing, everybody has a talent. And if they discover it, and they turn it to their purposes and make a living out of it, then they become not "that person," but they become "that writer" or "that doctor" or "that supervisor." — Harlan Ellison

If there was a sweet Jesus and if there was a God, the God was AM. — Harlan Ellison

Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself. — Harlan Ellison

A writer who writes more than he reads is an amateur. — Harlan Ellison

The mistake we all make is in assuming anybody remembers anydamnthing from one day to the next. If that were true, we'd stop getting involved with approximately the same kind of wrong lover each time, we'd learn the lessons of history, the death penalty would discourage those plotting murder, and George Santayana's famous quote would be about as popular as "the bee's knees." But few of us keep accurate records of what we've learned as we hobble through life barking our shins in the dark on experiences we've already had ... — Harlan Ellison

The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity. — Harlan Ellison

Repent, Harlequin," said the Ticktock Man. "Get stuffed," the Harlequin replied. — Harlan Ellison

I usually say I write for the smartest, cleverest, wittiest audience I know, and that's me. — Harlan Ellison

Everybody has opinions: I have them, you have them. And we are all told from the moment we open our eyes, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Well, that's horsepuckey, of course. We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it's nothing. It's just bibble-babble. It's like a fart in a wind tunnel, folks. — Harlan Ellison

To say more is to say less. — Harlan Ellison

I hate being wrong, but I love it when I'm set straight. — Harlan Ellison

I look upon those who assure me they had a 'happy childhood' as either pathological liars, or pariahs. — Harlan Ellison

I don't mind you thinking I'm stupid, but don't talk to me like I'm stupid — Harlan Ellison

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

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

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

You must never be afraid to go there. — Harlan Ellison

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

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

I was there when the first dreams came off the assembly line. I was there when the corrupted visions that had congealed in the vats were pincered up and hosed off and carried down the line to be dropped onto the rolling belts. I was there when the first workmen dropped their faceplates and turned on their welding torches. I was there when they began welding the foul things into their armor, when they began soldering the antennae, bolting on the wheels, pouring in the eye-socket jelly. I was there when they turned the juice on them and I was there when the things began to twitch. — Harlan Ellison

To see an almost certain horrible death
you know how crowds all sit at the edge of their seats, /praying/ subconsciously for a spectacular accident
and then to be whisked away from it so suddenly
brought to the edge of tragedy, and then to have their better natures win out, showing them how much nicer they always /knew/ they were
that was the supreme thrill. — Harlan Ellison

Then Alan looked thoughtful and seemed reluctant to speak, perhaps because he had just written the sequel to the Star Wars novelization that Lucas had sold to Ballantine Books, but in his reserved and gentlemanly fashion he told the audience of a day when he had seen a rough cut of the film and had remarked on just this scientific illiteracy to Lucas. He had even suggested a workable alternative ... no, two workable alternatives ... and Lucas had said words to the effect of (approximate quote), "There's a lot of money tied up in this film and people expect to hear a boom when something blows up, so I'll give them the boom." And at that moment, the cynicism showed through. — Harlan Ellison

You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant. — Harlan Ellison

Writing is a holy chore. — Harlan Ellison

HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE. — Harlan Ellison

I will live to piss in the open mouths or the open graves of my enemies, whichever comes first. — Harlan Ellison

The only thing worth writing about is people. People. Human beings. Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, insight by insight. If you do not do it, the story is a failure. [ ... ] There is no nobler chore in the universe than holding up the mirror of reality and turning it slightly, so we have a new and different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the 'normal', the obvious. People are reflected in the glass. The fantasy situation into which you thrust them is the mirror itself. And what we are shown should illuminate and alter our perception of the world around us. Failing that, you have failed totally. — Harlan Ellison

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

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

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

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

[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

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

And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes goes goes goes goes tick tock tick tock tick tock and one day we no longer let time serve us, we serve time and we are slaves of the schedule, worshipers of the sun's passing, bound into a life predicated on restrictions because the system will not function if we don't keep the schedule tight. — Harlan Ellison

There are some people who just shouldn't be allowed to fool around with love. — Harlan Ellison

I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned.
Adult. You have become adult. — Harlan Ellison

I don't know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyeballs water. — Harlan Ellison

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

We walked for some time, and grew to know each other, as best as we'd allow. These are some of the high points. They lack continuity. I don't apologize. I merely pointed it out, adding with some truth, I feel, that most liaisons lack continuity. We find ourselves in odd places at various times, and for a brief span we link our lives to others and then, our time elapsed, we move apart. Through a haze of pain occasionally, usually through a veil of memory that clings, then passes, sometimes as though we have never touched. — Harlan Ellison

NO ONE GETS OUT OF CHILDHOOD ALIVE. It's not the first time I've said that. But among the few worthy bon mots I've gotten off in sixty-seven years, that and possibly one other may be the only considerations eligible for carving on my tombstone. (The other one is the one entrepreneurs have misappropriated to emboss on buttons and bumper stickers: The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
(I don't so much mind that they pirated it, but what does honk me off is that they never get it right. They render it dull and imbecile by phrasing it thus: "The two most common things in the universe are ... "
(Not things, you insensate gobbets of ambulatory giraffe dung, elements! Elements is funny, things is imprecise and semi-guttural. Things! Geezus, when will the goyim learn they don't know how to tell a joke. — Harlan Ellison

He once told me the difference, as he saw it, between an author and a writer. An author (he said) is what they put on your passport, because in Europe they think a writer is a newspaperman. An author is somebody who get his name on the spine of leather-bound volumes that are never read; a writer is someone who gets hemorrhoids from sitting on his ass all his life ... writing. — Harlan Ellison

be careful of monsters with teeth — Harlan Ellison

There in the midst of the Amazon Jungle, Simon Haskell has cobbled up for himself a replica of an Art Deco salon. — Harlan Ellison

Get a day job, make your money from that, and write to please yourself. — Harlan Ellison

The solitary creator, dreaming his or her dream, unaided, seems to me to be the only artist we can trust. — Harlan Ellison

Why let them order you about? Why let them tell you to hurry and scurry like ants or maggots? Take your time! Saunter a while! Enjoy the sunshine, enjoy the breeze, let life carry you at your own pace! Don't be slaves of time, it's a helluva way to die, slowly, by degrees ... down with the Ticktockman! — Harlan Ellison

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

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

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

Jelly beans! Millions and billions of purples and yellows and greens and licorice and grape and raspberry and mint and round and smooth and crunchy outside and soft-mealy inside and sugary and bouncing jouncing tumbling clittering clattering skittering fell on the heads and shoulders and hardhats and carapaces of the Timkin works, tinkling on the slidewalk and bouncing away and rolling about underfoot and filling the sky on their way down with all the colors of joy and childhood and holidays, coming down in a steady rain, a solid wash, a torrent of color and sweetness out of the sky from above, and entering a universe of sanity and metronomic order with quite-mad coocoo newness. Jelly beans! — Harlan Ellison

The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer. — Harlan Ellison

My philosophy of life is that the meek shall inherit nothing but debasement, frustration and ignoble deaths; that there is security in personal strength; that you CAN fight City Hall and WIN; that any action is better than no action, even if it's the wrong action; that you never reach glory or self-fulfillment unless you're willing to risk everything, dare anything, put yourself dead on the line every time; and that once one becomes strong or rich or potent or powerful it is the responsibility of the strong to help the weak BECOME strong. — Harlan Ellison

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

Inside, The Boneyard seemed to cover the area of a township and the bar looked as long as the railroad tracks. Round pools of light on the green poker tables alternated with hourglass shapes of exciting gloom, through which drink girls and change girls moved like white-legged witches. By the jazz-stand in the distance, belly dancers made their white hourglass shapes. The gamblers were thick and hunched down as mushrooms, all bald from agonizing over the fall of a card or a die or the dive of an ivory ball, while the Scarlet Women were like fields of poinsettia. — Harlan Ellison

Humor should not be dissected because nothing lives through dissection. — Harlan Ellison

They minute people fall in love they become liars. — Harlan Ellison

DIscuss "narking" as a character flaw. — Harlan Ellison

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

AM said it with the sliding cold horror of a razor blade slicing my eyeball. AM
said it with the bubbling thickness of my lungs filling with phlegm, drowning me from within. AM said it with the shriek of babies being ground beneath blue-hot rollers. AM said it with the taste of maggoty pork. AM touched me in every way I had ever been touched, and devised new ways, at his leisure, there inside my mind. — Harlan Ellison

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

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

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

Love ain't nothing but sex misspelled. — Harlan Ellison

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

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

Everyone is entitled to an *informed* opinion. — Harlan Ellison

I have no mouth, and I must scream. — Harlan Ellison

The machine masturbated and we had to take it or die. — Harlan Ellison

Writing a novel is like going a great distance to take a small shit. — Harlan Ellison

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

(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

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

Any writer who pretends to a disaffection for recognition, I think they're being duplicitous. — Harlan Ellison

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

The real name for 'science' is magic. — Harlan Ellison

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

She thinks we were all killed when they made the Great Sweep, but I escaped in the mud. — Harlan Ellison

It crouches near the center of creation. There is no night where it waits. Only the riddle of which terrible dream will set it loose. It beheaded mercy to take possession of that place. It feasts on darkness from the minds of men. No one has ever seen its eyeless face. When it sleeps we know a few moments of peace. But when it breathes again we go down in fire and mate with jackals. It knows our fear. It has our number. It waited for our coming and it will abide long after we have become congealed smoke. It has never heard music, and shows its fangs when we panic. It is the beast of our savage past, hungering today, and waiting patiently for the mortal meal of all our golden tomorrows. It lies waiting. — Harlan Ellison

That's what happens, friends. It gets so damned depressing, coming up against the cultural hari-kiri we keep committing, that cynicism becomes the only supportable attitude. And then the kids prove they've got it. Even I, anxious to give them every possible point, begin to suspect the rot goes from top to bottom, young and old alike. And then the kids do me in. They come up with solid gold, and make me feel like the idiot I certainly am, on occasion. — Harlan Ellison

The only difference, I suppose, between them and me is that I never set out to write shit. (That is: merely sufficient, average.) And of all the crimes that may be attributed to me - numbering among them rudeness, lechery, viciousness, imprudence and disgusting egocentricity - the one that can never be laid on me is the one epitomized by the line, I just write what they want, by Tuesday, take the money and run. — Harlan Ellison

They change scapegoats at the networks more regularly than some people change socks. — Harlan Ellison

Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory — Harlan Ellison

Heaven is what you mix all the days of your life, but you call it dreams. You have one chance to buy your Heaven with all the intents and ethics of your life. That is why everyone considers Heaven such a lovely place. Because it is dreams, special dreams, in which you exist. What you have to do is live up to them. — Harlan Ellison

Anyone who can not write should. — Harlan Ellison

Style, like taste, is resistant to lucid definition; however, both, as living things should be, are subject to constant change. — Harlan Ellison

The trap into which all writers have, will, or should fall into, of writing The Great American Watchamacallit, is such an uncluttered and inviting one that from time to time I'm sure even the greatest have to pull themselves up short by the Shift key to remind themselves that it is story first that they should write. — Harlan Ellison

Entertain, yes. That goes without saying. But a good writer does that automatically, it's built into the machine. Telling a thumpingly good, mesmerizing story is what one does without question. But beyond that, any writer worth his/her hire knows that all writing, one way or another, is subversive. It is guerrilla warfare against the status quo. — Harlan Ellison

Posing the question: does the god of love use underarm deodorant, vaginal spray and fluoride toothpaste? — Harlan Ellison

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

I've only been an asshole to assholes! — Harlan Ellison

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

In these days of widespread illiteracy, functional illiteracy ... anything that keeps people stupid is a felony. — Harlan Ellison

If one is unable to buy Courvoisier, one should forcibly restrain oneself from serving strawberries Romanoff for dessert. — Harlan Ellison

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

Time is like a river flowing endlessly through the universe. And if you poled your flatboat in that river you might fight your way against the current and travel upstream into the past. Or go with the flow and rush into the future. This was in a less cynical time before toxic waste dumping and pollution filled the waterway of Chronus with the detritus of empty hours wasted minutes years of repetition and time that has been killed. — Harlan Ellison

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

We talked across each other, our conversation at right angles, only meeting in the intersections of silence at story's end. — Harlan Ellison