200 Quotes by Harlan Ellison

The real name for ‘science’ is magic.

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

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.

If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.

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.

My philosophy of life is that the meek shall inherit nothing but debasement, frustration, and ignoble deaths.

You’re a writer. And that’s something better than being a millionaire. Because it’s something holy.

Perhaps once we might be able to sneak a death past him. Immortal, yes, but not indestructible. I saw that when AM withdrew from my mind, and allowed me the exquisite ugliness of returning to consciousness with the feeling of that burning neon pillar still rammed deep into the soft gray brain matter. He withdrew, murmuring to hell with you. And added, brightly, but then you’re there, aren’t you.

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.