200 Quotes by 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.

Repent, Harlequin,” said the Ticktock Man. “Get stuffed,” the Harlequin replied.

I offer you the words of the Polish poet Edward Yashinsky, who said, “Fear not your enemies, for they can only kill you; fear not your friends, for they can only betray you. Fear only the indifferent, who permit the killers and betrayers to walk safely on the earth.

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

No, Father. I lack for nothing. I have my meal cakes and my ale. I have my shadows and my colors. And there is the smell of time passing. I need nothing more.

Love ain’t nothing but sex misspelled.

Story after story has marched the same old WASP engineer paperdoll through the same old story lines, most of which were very good when they were used by H. G. Wells, but which are now showing signs of wear.

Don’t start an argument with somebody who has a microphone when you don’t. They’ll make you look like chopped liver.

Who among us can deny that within every adult is caged a frightened child?