Quotes from M. John Harrison

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.

Before I came to the city I cut off my hair. It was the first of many fatally symbolic gestures.

The right fist rested on the pommel of his plain long sword, which, contrary to the fashion of the time, had no name. Cromis, whose lips were thin and bloodless, was more possessed by the essential qualities of things than by their names; concerned with the reality of Reality, rather than with the names men give it.

Adstreams floated everywhere, their unbearable lightness of being -- their simple promise -- catching you up: until the crown of butterflies round your head morphed into a crown of thorns and you found you had surrendered your intimate data to some twink-farmer forty blocks away on Pierpoint Street.

Two men deep in conversation could be seen disappearing along the opposite pavement towards Mortlake, their shadows cast huge and filmily onto the brewery walls by the kind of late-night city light that, while failing to relieve the darkness in any way, seems to pour in from every direction at once. Otherwise Wharf Terrace presented itself with only minute differences from his usual point of view. He had expected more.

Gdy to koty mia?y definiowa? ?wiat, wa?ne miejsce zajmowa?yby w nim po?erane dla zabawy muchy

He was, and always had been, the repository of more fears than hopes.

Viriconium, the Pastel City; a little cryptic, a little proud, a little mad. Its histories, as forgotten as his own, made of the air a sort of amber, an entrapment; the geometry of its avenues was a wry message from one survivor to another: and its present, like his own, was but an implication of its past - a dream, a prediction, a brief possibility to be endured.

You took your time,' she complained. He stared at her. 'You didn't want me here. You sent me a letter.' She laughed until she coughed. 'I never did!' she said, in the tone of a younger woman who learns only now of some bravura socio-sexual faux pas achieved with the aid of alcohol a week, a month or a year before. It was one of her most effective impersonations. For a moment she seemed full of life. 'I never did!

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.

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

But it wasn't until much later that I learned the sad facts of his death or the sadder ones of his life. By then I could be found in the pavement cafés of Sour Bridge, with a set of my own.

When the landed gentry cut up a seed cake for tea it makes no difference to the cake which of them holds the knife; whoever 'won' Earth's war, it would be the same old crew who stepped up to hold out their plates: the squabble over Truck and the Device was nothing more than a polite difference as to who should have the largest slice.

When the landed gentry cut up a seed cake for tea it makes no difference to the cake which of them holds the knife; whoever 'won' Earth's war, it would be the same old crew who stepped up afterward to hold out their plates: the squabble over Truck and the Device was nothing more than a polite difference between friends as to who should have the largest slice

Above this clamour rose the sharp, urgent pheromone of human expectation - a scent compounded less of sex or greed or aggression than of substance abuse, cheap falafel and expensive perfume.

It's only music, though she said. Perhaps, Aschemann agreed. For the detective, he thought, nothing is ever only itself.

She has never made up her mind between public acclaim—which she sees, rightly or wrongly, as destructive of the true artistic impulse—and obscurity, for which she is not temperamentally fitted.

You spent five years in a research tub at Radio RX-1 with the Kefahuchi Tract hanging over your shoulder like a huge boiling face, stripped, raw, heaving with some emotion you couldn't recognise. It's been fun,. It's been heartbreak all the way. It's never been less than a trip.

Then way I think of it is this: when you've done all the things worth doing, you're forced to start on the things that aren't.

Ruth Berenici sat on her narrow bed, tall and gray and beautiful, tracing with her fingertips the scar that immobilized the right side of her head from beneath the eye down to that place where neck meets shoulder. It would be naïve to mistake John Truck's half of that ramshackle, enduring affair for pity. It might well have been the other way round.

Viriconium is all the cities there have ever been.' Audsley King, Reminiscences

Much of life, you will never know what happened to you at all, let alone to anyone else.

who can but shiver and forgive in the damp theatrical airs of dawn? A

We waste our lives in half truths and nonsense. We waste them.