Quotes from M. John Harrison

It was only a moment of confusion, but it was carnivorous, and he sensed that by acknowledging it he had allowed it in.

The moment you step into a landscape it becomes another one.

People try to help, but all they have to work with is their theory of you. In the end they're talking to themselves.

Go the window: the street is empty. You may hear running footsteps, or a sigh. In a minute or two the whistles have moved away in the direction of the Tinmarket or the Margarethestrasse. Next day some minor prince is discovered in the gutter with his throat cut, and all you are left with is the impression of secret wars, lethal patience, an intelligent manouevring in the dark.

Suddenly he understood this as a condition of things – if you could see the patterns the waves made, or remember the shapes of a million small white clouds, there it would be, a boiling, inexplicable, vertiginous similarity in all the processes of the world, roaring silently away from you in ever-shifting repetitions, always the same, never the same thing twice.

Here, organic towers, tall shapeless masses of tissue cultured from the plasm of ancient mammals, trumpeted and moaned across the abandoned wastes of another continent, their huge cynical voices modulating on the wind, now immensely distant, now close at hand.

her eyes looked as bruised as if their life together had already occurred

The first time you came into my bar I saw that though you had been a pilot all your life, piloting was over for you.

None of us is anyone any more. We all lost who we were. But we can all be something else, and I will be so happy to fly this rocket anywhere you suggest, even though you and Irene called it Nova Swing, which is the cheapest name I ever heard.

All crimes," she remembered him advising, "are crimes against continuity—continuity of life, continuity of ownership, systems continuity.

This was how life went. A single moment seemed to extend forever, then suddenly you were snapped out of it. The forward motion of time stretched whatever rubbery glue-like substance had fixed you there until it failed catastrophically. You weren't the person you were before you got trapped; you weren't the person you were while you were trapped: the merciless thing about it, Liv discovered, was that you weren't someone entirely different either.

Often in that flickering room the past had come to touch her with quiet persistence, tugging at her sleeve in the effort to capture her attention

Anyway, this is less a haircut than a personal essay about haircuts.

Outside, a dog sprawls among the empty tables, its body rocking with the evening heat. Someone has given it a hamburger which first it guards, then, eventually, eats. It's some kind of winter dog, a malamute perhaps, a dog of marvellous subtle greys and whites. Also of transparent intelligence, and less transparent motive. The beauty of an animal like this appears to fix it in our expectations. But while its beauty says one thing, its heart may say another.

Horse-chestnut flowers bobbed like white wax candles above the deserted pavements. An oblique light struck into the street - so that its long and normally profitless perspective seemed to lead straight into the heart of a younger, more ingenuous city - and fell across the fronts of the houses where he had once lived, warming up the rotten brick and imparting to it a not unpleasant pinkish colour.

The true detective [...] starts in the center of the maze. Crimes make their way through to him. Never forget: you uncover your heart at the heart of it.

He ran until he didn't know where he was, except that it was waste lot midnight. The Kefahuchi Tract almost filled the sky, always growing as you watched, like the genie raging up out of the bottle, yet somehow never larger. It was a singularity without an event horizon, they said, the wrong physics loose in the universe. Anything could come out of there, but nothing ever did. Unless of course, Ed thought, what we have out here is already a result of what happens in there...

She had impressed him as capable of behaviour even more meaningless than most human beings. He had watched her kill her own people with a ferocity that betrayed real grief. But she was someone, he had decided early, who struggled harder with life than she needed to: this he respected, even admired.

Here we begin to guess at the nature of space... The Galaxy has given us our canvas, a dead dragonfly has bequeathed us the brushes we have to hand. We make Space. We define it... none of this belongs to Earth or to ideology. It is inviolate.' To prove his point, perhaps, space ignored him.

That's the one thing we never seem to get, how unpackable everything is.

and with a terrible lowing sound that echoed across the shallow poisoned tarns and endless peat hags of the continental waste, Benedict Paucemanly plunged into the full nightmare of his own decay.

I've never been to the Himalayas, and I'm not really interested in them. I'm more interested in a dirty old quarry in Lancashire, and by god, they can be dirty.

Everyone loves a mysterious country.

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.