"People don't die from the old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that's Progress, isn't it? Isn't it?"
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Quote collection
Harlan Ellison quotes (page 3 of 5)
90 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I usually say I write for the smartest, cleverest, wittiest audience I know, and that's me."
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"My philosophy of life is that the meek shall inherit nothing but debasement, frustration, and ignoble deaths."
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"Uh, excuse me, sir, I, uh, don't known how to uh, to uh, tell you this, but you were three minutes late. The schedule is a little, uh, bit off." He grinned sheepishly. "That's ridiculous!" murmured the Ticktockman behind his mask. "Check your watch." And then he went into his office, going mrmee, mrmee, mrmee, mrmee."
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"Get a day job, make your money from that, and write to please yourself."
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"I have but nothing to say to young girls. They're fine to look at, in the way I would look at a case filled with Shang dynasty glazes, but expecting to carry on a conversation with the average teen-aged young lady is akin to reading Voltaire to a cage filled with chimpanzees. I'm certain they would feel the same alienation for me. I can live with that knowledge."
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"I am not one of these people who instantly takes umbrage when he's corrected or - I love being corrected."
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"I have no mouth. And I must scream."
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"The real name for 'science' is magic."
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"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."
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"You're a writer. And that's something better than being a millionaire. Because it's something holy."
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"It is not merely enough to love literature if one wishes to spend one's life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forever on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possiblity of learning a truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear."
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"The act of writing means you wish to communicate. Whether you're writing a memoir for yourself you put in a drawer, or you write a poem and you send it to a little magazine, or you write for publication, it always means - the form follows function."
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"When you're all alone out there, on the end of the typewriter, with each new story a new appraisal by the world of whether you can still get it up or not, arrogance and self-esteem and deep breathing are all you have. It often looks like egomania. I assure you it's the bold coverup of the absolutely terrified."
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"I refuse to write the same story twice. I keep experimenting. I keep learning how to work. I've been at it pretty much 50 years, and I'm now beginning to learn how to do the job well."
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"Don't start an argument with somebody who has a microphone when you don't. They'll make you look like chopped liver."
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"Perfection. Excellence. What a passionate lover. But once having tasted the lips of excellence, once having given oneself to its perfection, how dreary and burdensome and filled with anomie are the remainder of one's waking hours trapped in the shackled lock-step of the merely ordinary, the barely acceptable, the just okay and not a stroke better."
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"The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility; that is my burden. And even I grow tired."
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"I've only been an asshole to assholes!"
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"I see all. I hear all. I know all. And I spend a great deal of time in the bathroom."
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