Top 18 Harlan Ellison Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.’

Nobody escapes age and gravity.

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

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.

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

I have no mouth, and I must scream.

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

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.

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

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

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