Quotes About Harlan Ellison

My philosophy of life is that the meek shall inherit nothing but debasement, frustration, and ignoble deaths.

Star Trek writers came in with supreme egos. I had worked with many of them before and found them, like most science-fiction writers, very unyielding to comment. Harlan [Ellison] was in a class by himself. He gave me an outline on The Mod Squad that would have cost twenty million dollars to produce.

If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as you want.

David Gerrold never wrote an episode that Gene thought was shootable … then how do we account for something titled "The Trouble with Tribbles"?)

As one disillusioned ex-Trek official recently said, "You know why they cremated Gene? They were afraid people would come to piss on the grave.

Science fiction used to be a dangerous literature. Now, it is a very commercial genre, and whatever dangers might still lurk within seem to have been safely sanitized for the marketplace. The real crime is that the lobotomy has been self performed. I

And [Asimov]'ll sign anything, hardbacks, softbacks, other people's books, scraps of paper. Inevitably someone handed him a blank check on the occasion when I was there, and he signed that without as much as a waver to his smile — except that he signed: 'Harlan Ellison.

HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.

I don't believe in "writers block." Lower your standards and keep writing. You can always go back later and make it better. Unless your name is Harlan Ellison, in which case your sentences come out perfectly parsed each time.