Harlan Ellison quotes - page 3

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you. (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. View quote
Harlan Ellison
This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir the soup. I inconvenience you. View quote
Harlan Ellison
Now he had form and substance. He had become a personality, something they had filtered out of the system many decades ago. View quote
Harlan Ellison
This is a test. Take notes. This will count as 3/4 of your final grade. View quote
Harlan Ellison
All these thoughts, as the guardian of Heaven, the keeper at the gate, the claimer of souls, the weigher of balances, advanced on him through the night. View quote
Harlan Ellison
Art is not supposed to be easier! View quote
Harlan Ellison
You create your own Heaven, and you have the opportunity to live in it, but you have to do it on your own terms, the highest terms of which you are capable. View quote
Harlan Ellison
NO ONE GETS OUT OF CHILDHOOD ALIVE. View quote
Harlan Ellison
Heaven is what you mix all the days of your life, but you call it dreams. You have one chance to buy your Heaven with all the intents and ethics of your life. That is why everyone considers Heaven such a lovely place. Because it is dreams, special dreams, in which you exist. What you have to do is live up to them. View quote
Harlan Ellison
By the way if I miss, during the evening, saying something offensive to you, insulting your sexual proclivity, your physical disability, your race, your religion, your sex, anything, please, raise your hand. I'll get to you, I promise. I'll say something really nasty. (Harlan Ellison)
I am anti-entropy. My work is foursquare for chaos. I spend my life personally, and my work professionally, keeping the soup boiling. View quote
Harlan Ellison
Christmas is an awfulness that compares favorably with the great London plague and fire of 1665-66. No one escapes the feelings of mortal dejection, inadequacy, frustration, loneliness, guilt and pity. View quote
Harlan Ellison
He is the Grand Master, A.E. can Vogt, weaver of a thousand ideas per plot-line, creator of alien thoughts and impossible dreams that rival the best ever built by our kind. View quote
Harlan Ellison
Van Vogt was the pinnacle, the source of power and ideas; the writer to beat. Because he embodied in his astonishing novels and assorted stories what we always say is of prime importance to us in this genre-the much vaunted Sense of Wonder. Van Vogt was the wellspring of wonder. View quote
Harlan Ellison
Griffin stood silently, watching the waterfall, sensing more than he saw, understanding more than even his senses could tell him. View quote
Harlan Ellison
I was able to make enough noise to get Van the Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master Award, which was presented to him in full ceremony during one of the last moments when he was cogent and clearheaded enough understand that finally, as last, dragged kicking and screaming to honor him, the generation that learned from what he did and what he had created had, at last, fessed up to his importance. View quote
Harlan Ellison
This was reality, an only reality for a man whose existence had been not quite bad, merely insufficient, tenable but hardly enriching. For a man who had lived a life of not quite enough, this was all there ever could be of goodness and brilliance and light. View quote
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. View quote
Harlan Ellison
Alfred E. van Vogt, since the appearance of his first two stories - "Black Destroyer" and "Discord in Scarlet" (Astounding Science Fiction, July and December 1939) the most memorable debut in the long history of the genre - has been a giant. View quote
Harlan Ellison
Were we in 1946 or even 1956, van Vogt would have already been able to hold the award aloft. (Harlan Ellison)
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. Because my immortal soul will be lost. View quote
Harlan Ellison
Anyone's demise or vanishment is in some small way tragic but the word "tragedy" requires greater measure for its use. ... Van' s great mind now gone. Tragedy. View quote
Harlan Ellison
I talk about the things people have always talked about in stories: pain, hate, truth, courage, destiny, friendship, responsibility, growing old, growing up, falling in love, all of these things. View quote
Harlan Ellison
I think love and sex are separate and only vaguely similar. View quote
Harlan Ellison