32 Quotes by M. John Harrison

SF is an opportunity to have an intense relationship with your own imagination. It's a kind of drive-by poetry, trashy and addictive; it's fun. After that, for me, it's an opportunity to explore that kind of imaginative artifact from inside, and use a little camped-up contemporary science as a way of generating new metaphors around my typical obsessions.

Manufacture dooms in your head and you will go mad. Reality is incontravertible. Also, it will not be anticipated.

Writings like gambling. Unpredictable and sporadic successes make you more addicted, not less.

Everyone loves a mysterious country.

I think it's undignified to read for the purposes of escape. After you grow up, you should start reading for other purposes

Stories pass the experienced world back and forth between them as a metaphor, until it is worn out. Only then do we realize that meaning is an act. We must repossess it, instant to instant in our lives.

At Birkin Grif’s left, his seat insecure on a scruffy packhorse, Theomeris Glyn, his only armour a steel-stressed leather cap, grumbled at the cold and the earliness of the hour, and cursed the flint hearts of city girls.

A gull planed steeply over their heads, a precarious flash of white against the windy blue sky. The short, hacking cry of a baby seemed to merge seamlessly for a moment with the gull’s repetitive wail, as if they were one species. One species, Falkender thought, raucous and scavenging; one species calling out in pain. To be human is to be mixed and miscegenated like this. To be lost.

He was lonely; I wanted to help, of course, but not from so intimate a distance; and lately our meetings had become memorable as a series of comically protracted farewells on station platforms and embarrassed, hasty protestations of friendship made through the windows of departing taxicabs.