Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There in the midst of the Amazon Jungle, Simon Haskell has cobbled up for himself a replica of an Art Deco salon.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.
Don't start an argument with somebody who has a microphone when you don't. They'll make you look like chopped liver.
K is for "Kenghis Khan"; He was a very nice person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere.
For the first time we have a weapon that nobody has used for thirty years. This gives me great hope for the human race.
We've got technological wonders around us, and we've used them to abrogate all responsibility for everything in our lives.
In my ugly, elitist opinion we are not all entitled to voice our opinions, we are entitled to pass along our informed opinions.
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 can't picture in my mind three hundred and sixty thousand dollars... When I think of it, all I can see in my mind is a big nickel.
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.'
If you let the image of the messenger get in the way of whatever message there may be, however large or small, that's your problem, not his.
I am responsible for myself. I am exactly who I eventually wanted myself to be, I guess, without consciously knowing what I wanted me to be.
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.
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.
I'm nothing. Nothing at all without writing. Without truth, my truth, the only truth I know, it's all a gambol in the pasture without rhythm or sense.
When you're a writer, you have to have the passion and the skill and the craft. It's not just enough to have the passion. You've gotta have all three.
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.
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.
[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.
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 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.
Because the chief commodity a writer has to sell is his courage. And if he has none, he is more than a coward. He is a sellout and a fink and a heretic, because writing is a holy chore.
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.
What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads... The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better is my work.
Thus, from admiration of one wise and innocent child, and from a misheard remark, the process that not even Aristotle could codify was triggered. Where do you get your ideas? I purposely mishear things.
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'.
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.
I made as many mistakes as anybody else. I sound as if I'm an egomaniac, and I suppose in some ways I'm filled with hubris because I know how good I am at certain things. But other things, I can't do at all. I can't draw.
Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.
I was the green monkey, the pariah. And I had no friends. Not just a few friends, or one good friend, or grudging acceptance by other misfits and outcasts. I was alone. All stinking alone, without even an imaginary playmate.
I never send a story off until I have read it aloud to at least two or three people. Because when I read - and I don't need their criticism, what I need is my own - when I read it aloud, there is a flow, there is a poetry to it.
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.
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.
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.
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 [email protected].
I cannot pay attention to what people say about my work. For me, personally, I am just this shards-and-ashes human being, who really gets upset when someone says something bad about me. If it's true, I cop to it. If I have any good qualities, it's that.
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.
And we passed through the cavern of rats. And we passed through the path of boiling steam. And we passed through the country of the blind. And we passed through the slough of despond. And we passed through the vale of tears. And we came, finally, to the ice caverns.
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!
The more you know, the more unflinchingly you deny casual beliefs and Accepted Wisdom when it flies in the face of reality, the more carefully you observe the world and its people around you, the better chance you have of writing something meaningful and well-crafted.
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.
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.
There is Harlan Ellison the human being, who takes a crap a couple of times a day, and who farts, and who eats chicken croquettes, if I can find them. And then there is the writer, this writer-person, who is a much finer person than I. Much more orderly, much more meaningful. Worthier, than I [am].
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!
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.
Everybody has a talent, whether it's scrapbooking, or kite-flying, or brain surgery, or writing, everybody has a talent. And if they discover it, and they turn it to their purposes and make a living out of it, then they become not "that person," but they become "that writer" or "that doctor" or "that supervisor."
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.
The trap into which all writers have, will, or should fall into, of writing The Great American Watchamacallit, is such an uncluttered and inviting one that from time to time I'm sure even the greatest have to pull themselves up short by the Shift key to remind themselves that it is story first that they should write.
Y is for YGGDRASIL. The legendary Nordic ash tree with its three roots extending into the lands of mortals, giants, and Niflheim, the land of mist, grows in Wisconsin. Legend has it that when the tree falls, the universe will fall. Next Wednesday, the State Highway Commission comes through that empty pasture with a freeway.
Entertain, yes. That goes without saying. But a good writer does that automatically, it's built into the machine. Telling a thumpingly good, mesmerizing story is what one does without question. But beyond that, any writer worth his/her hire knows that all writing, one way or another, is subversive. It is guerrilla warfare against the status quo.