32 Quotes by M. John Harrison

Egnaro is a secret known to everyone but yourself.It is a country or a city to which you have never been; it is an unknown language. At the same time it is like being cuckolded, or plotted against. It is part of the universe of events which will never wholly reveal itself to you: a conspiracy the barest outline of which, once visible, will gall you forever.

Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was ominous becomes ordinary; what was bizarre, quotidian. Unless you simply keep upping the ante, piling on the bullshit, the only way to revive things is to switch perspectives as quickly as you can.

Outside, a dog sprawls among the empty tables, its body rocking with the evening heat. Someone has given it a hamburger which first it guards, then, eventually, eats. It's some kind of winter dog, a malamute perhaps, a dog of marvellous subtle greys and whites. Also of transparent intelligence, and less transparent motive. The beauty of an animal like this appears to fix it in our expectations. But while its beauty says one thing, its heart may say another.

The first time we spoke, Mr. Ambraysas told me, 'Identity is not negotiable. An identity you have achieved by agreement is always a prison.

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.

When I was little, she thought, I wanted nothing except to stop travelling. I wanted time for each new thing, each new feeling, to be held properly in suspension until it could be joined by the next. Given the chance I could easily hold all those beautiful things together. I could be like a box in which they would be held new forever. Instead, everything aged and changed. People too.

Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East’s exuberant vision of the West, the West’s uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up city; a city almost completely faked; a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna — the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation.

What is literature, and why do I try to write about it? I don’t know. Likewise, I don’t know why I go on living, most of the time. But this not knowing is precisely what I want to preserve. As readers, the closest way we can engage with a literary work is to protect its indeterminacy; to return ourselves and it to a place that precludes complete recognition. Really, when I’m reading, all I want is to stand amazed in front of an unknown object at odds with the world.

World-building numbs the reader's ability to fulfill their part of the bargain because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done. Above all, world-building is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn't there.