Top 90 Harlan Ellison Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “You can live in your dreams, but only if you are worthy of them.”

— Harlan Ellison

54. “When belief in a god dies, the god dies.”

— Harlan Ellison

55. “For the first time we have a weapon that nobody has used for thirty years. This gives me great hope for the human race.”

— Harlan Ellison

56. “I usually say I write for the smartest, cleverest, wittiest audience I know, and that’s me.”

— Harlan Ellison

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

— Harlan Ellison

58. “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.”

— Harlan Ellison

59. “Any writer who pretends to a disaffection for recognition, I think they’re being duplicitous.”

— Harlan Ellison

60. “There in the midst of the Amazon Jungle, Simon Haskell has cobbled up for himself a replica of an Art Deco salon.”

— Harlan Ellison

61. “I refuse to write the same story twice. I keep experimenting. I keep learning how to work. I’ve been at it pretty much 50 years, and I’m now beginning to learn how to do the job well.”

— Harlan Ellison

62. “I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure.”

— Harlan Ellison

63. “Posing the question: does the god of love use underarm deodorant, vaginal spray and fluoride toothpaste?”

— Harlan Ellison

64. “There are certain injustices in this life you’ve got to do something about. You can’t just say that you can’t fight it, or it’s too much trouble, or that you don’t have the time or the effort, or that you can’t win. Forget all that. Fight them all!”

— Harlan Ellison

65. “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.”

— Harlan Ellison

66. “If you let the image of the messenger get in the way of whatever message there may be, however large or small, that’s your problem, not his.”

— Harlan Ellison

67. “Who among us can deny that within every adult is caged a frightened child?”

— Harlan Ellison

68. “Thus, from admiration of one wise and innocent child, and from a misheard remark, the process that not even Aristotle could codify was triggered. Where do you get your ideas? I purposely mishear things.”

— Harlan Ellison

69. “I made as many mistakes as anybody else. I sound as if I’m an egomaniac, and I suppose in some ways I’m filled with hubris because I know how good I am at certain things. But other things, I can’t do at all. I can’t draw.”

— Harlan Ellison

70. “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.”

— Harlan Ellison

71. “Ashamed apologies and a gentle thank you. I do not digress.”

— Harlan Ellison

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

— Harlan Ellison

73. “They change scapegoats at the networks more regularly than some people change socks.”

— Harlan Ellison

74. “I never send a story off until I have read it aloud to at least two or three people. Because when I read – and I don’t need their criticism, what I need is my own – when I read it aloud, there is a flow, there is a poetry to it.”

— Harlan Ellison

75. “Each of us moves through life shadowed by childhood memories. We never forget. We are bent and shaped and changed by those ancient fears and hatreds. They are the mortal dreads that in a million small ways block us off or drive us toward our destiny.”

— Harlan Ellison

76. “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.”

— Harlan Ellison

77. “The problem isn’t what to say about the incredible Ursula Le Guin, it’s where to start.”

— Harlan Ellison

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

— Harlan Ellison

79. “They are stories I wrote because my friends are gone, a lot of them, and if you can’t be angry about it, how the hell much did you care to begin with?”

— Harlan Ellison

80. “Man denkt sich nicht mit der psychischen Brechstange in jemanden hinein.”

— Harlan Ellison

81. “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.”

— Harlan Ellison

82. “There is only one real evil in the world: mediocrity.”

— Harlan Ellison

83. “Excellence is its own master, owes no allegiance, bows its head to no regimen. It exists pure and whole like the silver face of the moon. Untouchable, unreachable, exquisite. But frustrating because it reminds us of how much mediocrity we put up with, just to get through the week.”

— Harlan Ellison

84. “You do not have a right to an opinion. You have the right to an informed opinion. You do not have a right to be ignorant.”

— Harlan Ellison

85. “Or, as Goethe summed it: “Know thyself? If I knew myself, I’d run away.”

— Harlan Ellison

86. “Some hundreds of years may have passed. I don’t know. AM has been having fun for some time, accelerating and retarding my time sense. I will say the word now. Now. It took me ten months to say now. I don’t know. I think it has been some hundreds of years.”

— Harlan Ellison

87. “He had discovered the scents and aromas of a spring that was eternally one day away.”

— Harlan Ellison

88. “He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with his forever time. We would be forever with him, with the cavern-filling bulk of the creature machine, with the all-mind soulless world he had become. He was Earth, and we were the fruit of that Earth; and though he had eaten us he would never digest us. We could not die. We had tried it. We had attempted suicide, oh one or two of us had. But AM had stopped us. I suppose we had wanted to be stopped.”

— Harlan Ellison

89. “Also England is a good country for introverts; they have a place in society for the introvert, which the United States has not.”

— Harlan Ellison

90. “Humor should not be dissected because nothing lives through dissection.”

— Harlan Ellison