Top 115 Quotes & Sayings by Harlan Ellison

Love ain't nothing but sex misspelled.

Most fiction says you may or may not be alive tomorrow; science fiction talks often about the future.

I don't mind you thinking I'm stupid, but don't talk to me like I'm stupid.

I don't think I've ever really been a science fiction writer. I'm closer to a fantasist, speculative fiction, whatever, but labels are ultimately derogatory, and I eschew them as best I can.

I don't remember anyone who could stand being in my company for more than five hours without running into the street.

I never know what I'm going to talk about until I get on stage. I never give the same lecture twice, which is why I'll have people follow me from place to place like Deadheads.

The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.

I hate being wrong, but I love it when I'm set straight.

There's some things that no amount of money can get me to do.

You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.

I would jump at the chance to work with the inordinately-talented J.J. Abrams on a new 'Star Trek' film.

I'm real tall when I stand on my charisma.

I write a kind of surreal fantasy, but they can't put 'surreal fantasy' on a paperback.

Success is to bring into existence, in adult terms, your childhood dreams.

I'm a storyteller. If I have that on my precis when I go, 'Storyteller,' I'm satisfied with that.

Everywhere I go, I find that writers are treated as if they are invisible, as if they don't matter.

I go to bed angry every night, and I get up angrier every morning.

Five thousand Don Hecks are not worth one Neal Adams.

There might be children in Somalia or the Arctic who have never heard of 'Hamlet' or the 'Great Gatsby.' But you can bet they know 'Tarzan.'

We've got technological wonders around us, and we've used them to abrogate all responsibility for everything in our lives.

When belief in a god dies, the god dies.

To say more, is to say less.

I'm like a snake sleeping on a rock. I won't bother you unless you poke a stick at me.

I have no mouth, and I must scream.

People keep saying that books will never die out. Well, books may never die out, but hundreds of thousands of individual writers will, and for them, it's as if books did die out.

I'm not nearly as significant as Ralph Nader or the local plumber.

Nobody escapes age and gravity.

History will decide if I'm a villain or a hero.

All you have to do is look out around you at the good things you've done, and you'll know how good you are.

You watch enough TV, and very soon the inside of your head has become a vast, arid plain, across which you cannot detect the passage of a thought.

Science fiction and fantasy is a kind of literature that embodies the highest aspirations of the human race.

It was a superlative joy of my long life to have worked with Leonard Nimoy, who became my friend, and many others at 'Star Trek.'

I think art must be tough! I think art has to be hard. I don't think it should be easy. I think it should take foot-pounds of energy to produce that art, otherwise we would have more mediocre writers, and we don't have room for any more mediocrity in the world. There's already enough of it being visited on us night and day through the Internet, and through television, and through politics.

I think [religion] is presumptuous and I think it is silly, because it makes you believe that you are less than what you can be. As long as you can blame everything on some unseen deity, you don’t ever have to be responsible for your own behavior.

I usually say I write for the smartest, cleverest, wittiest audience I know, and that's me.

We walked for some time, and grew to know each other, as best as we'd allow. These are some of the high points. They lack continuity. I don't apologize. I merely pointed it out, adding with some truth, I feel, that most liaisons lack continuity. We find ourselves in odd places at various times, and for a brief span we link our lives to others and then, our time elapsed, we move apart. Through a haze of pain occasionally, usually through a veil of memory that clings, then passes, sometimes as though we have never touched.

My philosophy of life is that the meek shall inherit nothing but debasement, frustration and ignoble deaths; that there is security in personal strength; that you can fight City Hall and win; that any action is better than no action, even if it's the wrong action; that you never reach glory or self-fulfillment unless you're willing to risk everything, dare anything, put yourself dead on the line every time; and that once one becomes strong or rich or potent or powerful it is the responsibility of the strong to help the weak become strong.

With the Internet, the greatest disseminator of bad data and bad information the universe has ever known, it's become impossible to trust any news from any source at all, because it's filtered through this crazy yenta gossip line. It's impossible to know anything.

I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned. Adult. You have become adult.

K is for "Kenghis Khan"; He was a very nice person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere.

You must never be afraid to go there.

Why let them order you about? Why let them tell you to hurry and scurry like ants or maggots? Take your time! Saunter a while! Enjoy the sunshine, enjoy the breeze, let life carry you at your own pace! Don't be slaves of time, it's a helluva way to die, slowly, by degrees...down with the Ticktockman!

I will use big words from time to time, the meanings of which I may only vaguely perceive, in hopes such cupidity will send you scampering to your dictionary: I will call such behavior 'public service'.

Star Wars is adolescent nonsense; Close Encounters is obscurist drivel; ‘Star Trek’ can turn your brains into puree of bat guano; and the greatest science fiction series of all time is Doctor Who! And I'll take you all on, one-by-one or all in a bunch to back it up!

Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.

There is no nobler chore in the craft of writing than holding up the mirror of reality and turning it slightly, so we have a new and different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the 'normal,' the obvious. People are reflected in the glass. The fantasy situation into which you thrust them is the mirror itself. And what we are shown should illuminate and alter our perception of the world around us. Failing that, you have failed totally.

They minute people fall in love they become liars.

In these days of widespread illiteracy, functional illiteracy... anything that keeps people stupid is a felony.

The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.

The real story of our times is seldom told in the horse-puckey-filled memoirs of dopey, self-serving presidents or generals, but in the outrageous, demented lives of guys like Lenny Bruce, Giordano Bruno, Scott Fitzgerald - and Paul Krassner. The burrs under society's saddle. The pains in the ass.

You're a writer. And that's something better than being a millionaire. Because it's something holy.

That's probably one of my biggest gripes with the Internet - that it settles for mediocrity and disinformation, which puts all information on the same level. Everything has the same value, whether it's Albert Einstein speaking, or yoohoo27@msn.com.

The world is turning into a cesspool of imbeciles.

I don't know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. 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. I make your nose run and your eyes water.

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

Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.

[On love:] I have no respect for anyone who says they've given up, or that they're not looking or that they're tired. That is to abrogate one's responsibility as a human being.

Everybody has opinions: I have them, you have them. And we are all told from the moment we open our eyes, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Well, that's horsepuckey, of course. We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it's nothing. It's just bibble-babble. It's like a fart in a wind tunnel, folks.

It is a love/hate relationship I have with the human race. I am an elitist, and 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.

People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.