200 Quotes by Harlan Ellison

The English are slightly more civilized than anyone else has yet been. Also England is a good country for introverts; they have a place in society for the introvert, which the United States has not.

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.

I mean, what do you do, when you find that things are not what you were taught they’re supposed to be? What do you do with the desperation that boils up from your stomach when you know there’s a road out there with your destination at the end of it, but it’s too damned dark to even find the road? You turn and turn and turn around like a dog trying to escape. Shrieks in the cavity of your head that so urgently needs to be filled with facts and challenges.

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

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

The explanations a writer gives himself for having written any particular book are more often not the real reasons why that book has been written. Honesty is not the issue. Understanding is. A man does not write one novel at a time or even one quatrain at a time. He is engaged in the long process of putting his whole life on paper. He is on a journey and he is reporting in: ‘This is where I think I am and this is what this place looks like today.’” The.

Too many of our insanities are tolerated because they are harmless on an individual level – but multiply them by a millionfold and you have a nation that is culturally sick. These things stem from each individual’s conception of himself – which he arbitrarily assumes to be the nature of the world as well. These conceptions are haphazardly picked up during youth – along with all of the other opinions, neuroses, hangups and etceteras common to the human animal.

I hate being wrong, but I love it when I’m set straight.

I never met a man I didn’t like. I don’t go out much.