Talk:Harlan Ellison

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Harlan Ellison is brazen and more often than not politically correct. Although I think his position on God is more shock than true crock, his position on TV is radically better: "I think television is itself bad. The idea of television, the act of watching television kills the imagination. It's not like radio, with radio you had to listen, had to make things, you had to build things in your mind. Movies do that. Television is something else again. Television lays it all out there in a very prescribed way and the bare minimum of imagination on the part of the viewer is needed and I really fear for all of us." (spoken in a 1979 interview by Robert W. Bly, quoted from The Online Copywriter's Handbook, pub. in 2002)

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• Did you ever notice, the only one in A Christmas Carol with any character is Scrooge? Marley is a whiner who fucked over the world and then hadn't the spine to pay his dues quietly; Belle, Scrooge's ex-girlfriend, deserted him when he needed her most; Bob Cratchit is a gutless toady without enough get-up-and-go to assert himself; and the less said about that little treacle-mouth, Tiny Tim, the better.

• 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 eyeballs water.

• 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. What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads. I try to go into those places in me that contain the cauldrous. I want to dip up the fire, and I want to put it on paper. The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better is my work.

• 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."

• If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.

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

• 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. Because my immortal soul will be lost.

• 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.

• The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen... and stupidity.
  • Variant: The two most abundant things in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity. Also attributed to Albert Einstein.

• There are two things I found when I did the Merv Griffin show, the two things I said that got them really crazy, was that I didn't believe in god, and that I really believe there are some people who are better than others.

• When they say, "Gee, it's an information explosion!" — no, it's not an explosion, it's a disgorgement of the bowels is what it is. Every idiotic thing that anybody could possibly write or say or think can get into the body politic now — where before things would have to have some merit to go through the publishing routine, now, anything. And all you're getting is an explosion of useless crap, which added to the other useless crap that was being done originally, only makes it that much worse.
  • Compare with "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea; massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." by Gene Spafford

• Why do people keep insisting that I join the twenty-first century? I live in the twenty-first century! I just don't want to be bothered by the shitheads on the internet!