Harlan Jay Ellison was an American writer of short stories, novels, essays, and television and film scripts. He was known as a furiously prolific and cantankerous writer. Though he eschewed genre categorization himself, his work was most frequently labeled science fiction. Motivational Harlan Ellison quotes will show you some of his wittiest and most insightful thoughts.
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Most Famous Harlan Ellison Quotes
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant. Harlan Ellison
The problem isn’t what to say about the incredible Ursula Le Guin, it’s where to start. Harlan Ellison
I’m like a snake sleeping on a rock. I won’t bother you unless you poke a stick at me. Harlan Ellison
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
The only thing worth writing about is people. People. Human beings. Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, insight by insight. Harlan Ellison
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
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
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
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. Harlan Ellison
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
Any writer who pretends to a disaffection for recognition, I think they’re being duplicitous. Harlan Ellison
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
Entertain, yes. That goes without saying. But a good writer does that automatically, it’s built into the machine. Telling a thumpingly good, mesmerizing story is what one does without question. Harlan Ellison
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
When you’re all alone out there, on the end of the typewriter, with each new story a new appraisal by the world of whether you can still get it up or not, arrogance and self esteem and deep breathing are all you have. Harlan Ellison
They change scapegoats at the networks more regularly than some people change socks. Harlan Ellison
Be careful of monsters with teeth. Harlan Ellison
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
The real name for ‘science’ is magic. Harlan Ellison
I never met a man I didn’t like. I don’t go out much. Harlan Ellison
Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself. Harlan Ellison
There in the midst of the Amazon Jungle, Simon Haskell has cobbled up for himself a replica of an Art Deco salon. Harlan Ellison
History will decide if I’m a villain or a hero. Harlan Ellison
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
We’ve got technological wonders around us, and we’ve used them to abrogate all responsibility for everything in our lives. Harlan Ellison
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
Possibly the only dismaying aspect of excellence is that it makes living in a world of mediocrity an ongoing prospect of living hell. Harlan Ellison
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
You watch enough TV, and very soon the inside of your head has become a vast, arid plain, across which you cannot detect the passage of a thought. Harlan Ellison
Any writer who pretends to a disaffection for recognition, I think they’re being duplicitous. Harlan Ellison
It is not merely enough to love literature if one wishes to spend one’s life as a writer. Harlan Ellison
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
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
Who among us can deny that within every adult is caged a frightened child? Harlan Ellison
Take your time! Saunter a while! Enjoy the sunshine, enjoy the breeze, let life carry you at your own pace! Don’t be slaves of time, it’s a helluva way to die, slowly, by degrees down with the Ticktockman! Harlan Ellison
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
Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned. Adults. You have become an adult. Harlan Ellison
Style, like taste, is resistant to lucid definition; however, both, as living things should be, are subject to constant change. Harlan Ellison
I have no respect for anyone who says they’ve given up, or that they’re not looking or that they’re tired. That is to abrogate one’s responsibility as a human being. Harlan Ellison
You can live in your dreams, but only if you are worthy of them. Harlan Ellison
Everybody has a talent, whether it’s scrapbooking, or kite flying, or brain surgery, or writing, everybody has a talent. Harlan Ellison
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
It is a love/hate relationship I have with the human race. I am an elitist, and I feel that my responsibility is to drag the human race along with me, that I will never pander to, or speak down to, or play the safe game. Harlan Ellison
When belief in a god dies, the god dies. Harlan Ellison
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
I usually say I write for the smartest, cleverest, wittiest audience I know, and that’s me. Harlan Ellison
The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity. Harlan Ellison
Surrounded by madness, surrounded by hunger, surrounded by everything but death, I knew death was our only way out. Harlan Ellison
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
Love ain’t nothing but sex misspelled. Harlan Ellison
The world is turning into a cesspool of imbeciles. Harlan Ellison
People don’t die from old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that’s Progress, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Harlan Ellison
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
I know that my true friend will appear after my death, and my sweetheart died before I was born. Harlan Ellison
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
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
Star Wars is adolescent nonsense; Close Encounters is obscurist drivel; ‘Star Trek’ can turn your brains into puree of bat guano; and the greatest science fiction series of all time is Doctor Who! And I’ll take you all on, one by one or all in a bunch to back it up! Harlan Ellison
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
With the Internet, the greatest disseminator of bad data and bad information the universe has ever known, it’s become impossible to trust any news from any source at all, because it’s filtered through this crazy yenta gossip line. It’s impossible to know anything. Harlan Ellison
Writing is a holy chore. Harlan Ellison
Humor should not be dissected because nothing lives through dissection. Harlan Ellison
Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory. Harlan Ellison
I will use big words from time to time, the meanings of which I may only vaguely perceive, in hopes such cupidity will send you scampering to your dictionary: I will call such behavior public service. Harlan Ellison
He withdrew, murmuring to hell with you. And added, brightly, but then you’re there, aren’t you. The. Harlan Ellison
They change scapegoats at the networks more regularly than some people change socks. Harlan Ellison.
