Quotes from Harlan Ellison

we are all inescapably responsible, not only for our own actions, but for our lack of action, the morality and ethic of our silences and our avoidances, the shared guilt of hypocrisy, voyeurism, and cowardice; what might be called the "spectator-sport social conscience.

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.

It's from Lear," she said. "Wait. Yes. 'As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.

The only difference, I suppose, between them and me is that I never set out to write shit. (That is: merely sufficient, average.) And of all the crimes that may be attributed to me—numbering among them rudeness, lechery, viciousness, imprudence and disgusting egocentricity—the one that can never be laid on me is the one epitomized by the line, "I just write what they want, by Tuesday, take the money and run.

AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet … AM has won, simply … he has taken his revenge … I have no mouth. And I must scream. (Page 13).

He was furious. He wouldn't let me bury them. It didn't matter. There was no way to dig up the deckplates. He dried up the snow. He brought the night. He roared and sent locusts. It didn't do a thing; they stayed dead. I'd had him.

But commercialism is the last sinkhole of love, and when reached, by paths of desperation and paths of cruelty, misused emotions—all hope is gone. There is no return save by miracles, and there are no more miracles for the common among common men.

Who Needs the Taj Mahal when it's a drag to live at all?

Recovery comes slowly. But the writing—which keeps me alive because it's all I've got—goes on.

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.

Sometimes being able to read makes more questions than if you were stupid.

Even when they tell you "it can't be done, it's never been done, nobody's ever done it that way," all they're revealing about themselves is that they are limited, minimally-talented, inept, lazy to the point where they'll let the job walk out the door then have to stretch their imagination to figure out a way the job can be done, and they are not people you should be dealing with, because they can't solve their own problems, much less yours.

i loooveee ted i loove ted s much he is soooo hot

In 1965, I was entertaining author Norman Spinrad in my itty-bitty Los Angeles treehouse, coyly called "Ellison Wonderland," from the book of the same title.

And John Hersey in The Child Buyer; and Only Lovers Left Alive, flawed as it was;

AM said it with the shriek of babies being ground beneath blue–hot rollers.

Oh, Jesus sweet Jesus, if there ever was a Jesus and if there is a God, please please please let us out of here, or kill us. Because at that moment I think I realized completely, so that I was able to verbalize it: AM was intent on keeping us in his belly forever, twisting and torturing us forever. The machine hated us as no sentient creature had ever hated before. And we were helpless. It also became hideously clear: If there was a sweet Jesus and if there was a God, the God was AM.

That's what happens, friends. It gets so damned depressing, coming up against the cultural hari-kiri we keep committing, that cynicism becomes the only supportable attitude. And then the kids prove they've got it. Even I, anxious to give them every possible point, begin to suspect the rot goes from top to bottom, young and old alike. And then the kids do me in. They come up with solid gold, and make me feel like the idiot I certainly am, on occasion.

Most of us think we're more important than we really are, Charlie. The universe isn't watching. It mostly, for the most part, doesn't care.

Sometimes it seems to me the modern world can only be viewed as conspiracy. The Right tends to credit communism with planning race riots and campus disorders

Or, as Goethe summed it: "Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away.

Think about this, drunk comes in four parts, jocose, morose, bellicose, comatose.

No way was clear, no light unbroken, in the forest. Into wind, water, sunlight, starlight, there always entered leaf and branch, bole and root, the shadowy, the complex.

People on the outside think there's something magical about writing…