Top 90 Harlan Ellison Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”

— Harlan Ellison

2. “The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.”

— Harlan Ellison

3. “The real name for ‘science’ is magic.”

— Harlan Ellison

4. “The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.”

— Harlan Ellison

5. “I don’t mind you thinking I’m stupid, but don’t talk to me like I’m stupid.”

— Harlan Ellison

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

— Harlan Ellison

7. “They minute people fall in love they become liars.”

— Harlan Ellison

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

— Harlan Ellison

9. “To say more, is to say less.”

— Harlan Ellison

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

— Harlan Ellison

11. “Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.”

— Harlan Ellison

12. “Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.”

— Harlan Ellison

13. “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.”

— Harlan Ellison

14. “The world is turning into a cesspool of imbeciles.”

— Harlan Ellison

15. “Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.”

— Harlan Ellison

16. “I have no mouth. And I must scream.”

— Harlan Ellison

17. “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.”

— Harlan Ellison

18. “I am not one of these people who instantly takes umbrage when he’s corrected or – I love being corrected.”

— Harlan Ellison

19. “I am responsible for myself. I am exactly who I eventually wanted myself to be, I guess, without consciously knowing what I wanted me to be.”

— Harlan Ellison

20. “The act of writing means you wish to communicate. Whether you’re writing a memoir for yourself you put in a drawer, or you write a poem and you send it to a little magazine, or you write for publication, it always means – the form follows function.”

— Harlan Ellison

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

— Harlan Ellison

22. “Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory.”

— Harlan Ellison

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

— Harlan Ellison

24. “Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven’t been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.”

— Harlan Ellison

25. “I was the green monkey, the pariah. And I had no friends. Not just a few friends, or one good friend, or grudging acceptance by other misfits and outcasts. I was alone. All stinking alone, without even an imaginary playmate.”

— Harlan Ellison

26. “You must never be afraid to go there.”

— Harlan Ellison

27. “Love ain’t nothing but sex misspelled.”

— Harlan Ellison

28. “I now believe that television itself, the medium of sitting in front of a magic box that pulses images at us endlessly, the act of watching TV, per se, is mind crushing. It is soul deadening, dehumanizing, soporific in a poisonous way, ultimately brutalizing. It is, simply put so you cannot mistake my meaning, a bad thing.”

— Harlan Ellison

29. “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.”

— Harlan Ellison

30. “Because the chief commodity a writer has to sell is his courage. And if he has none, he is more than a coward. He is a sellout and a fink and a heretic, because writing is a holy chore.”

— Harlan Ellison

31. “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.”

— Harlan Ellison

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

— Harlan Ellison

33. “In my ugly, elitist opinion we are not all entitled to voice our opinions, we are entitled to pass along our informed opinions.”

— Harlan Ellison

34. “A writer who writes more than he reads is an amateur.”

— Harlan Ellison

35. “He withdrew, murmuring to hell with you. And added, brightly, but then you’re there, aren’t you. The.”

— Harlan Ellison

36. “I see all. I hear all. I know all. And I spend a great deal of time in the bathroom.”

— Harlan Ellison

37. “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.”

— Harlan Ellison

38. “The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility; that is my burden. And even I grow tired.”

— Harlan Ellison

39. “First there was light, and then there was no-light. First there was heat, and then there was no-heat. And – First there was love, and then there was no-love. But in its place did not come the absence of love, the emptiness that the going of light and heat had left. Another moved in to take its place. In its place came hate.”

— Harlan Ellison

40. “I know that my true friend will appear after my death, and my sweetheart died before I was born.”

— Harlan Ellison

41. “Writing is a holy chore.”

— Harlan Ellison

42. “I think love and sex are separate and only vaguely similar. Like the word bear and the word bare. You can get in trouble mistaking one for the other.”

— Harlan Ellison

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

— Harlan Ellison

44. “K is for “Kenghis Khan”; He was a very nice person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere.”

— Harlan Ellison

45. “Get a day job, make your money from that, and write to please yourself.”

— Harlan Ellison

46. “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.”

— Harlan Ellison

47. “Surrounded by madness, surrounded by hunger, surrounded by everything but death, I knew death was our only way out.”

— Harlan Ellison

48. “People don’t die from the old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that’s Progress, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

— Harlan Ellison

49. “Ellison’s Theorem: the further right your position, the less telling your satire. A corollary of which is that you can’t lampoon anywhere near where you stand, because you’d annihilate your own troops.”

— Harlan Ellison

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

— Harlan Ellison