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

Harlan Ellison

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Harlan Ellison
Age: 84 †
Born: 1934
Born: May 27
Died: 2018
Died: June 27
Film Critic
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Cleveland
Ohio
Harlan Jay Ellison
Life
Stupidity
Elements
Stupid
Common
Funny
Universe
Science
Two
Hydrogen

More quotes by Harlan Ellison

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Get a day job, make your money from that, and write to please yourself.
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They change scapegoats at the networks more regularly than some people change socks.
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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.
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Everyone is entitled to an *informed* opinion.
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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.
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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.
Harlan Ellison
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In these days of widespread illiteracy, functional illiteracy... anything that keeps people stupid is a felony.
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For the first time we have a weapon that nobody has used for thirty years. This gives me great hope for the human race.
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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.
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I usually say I write for the smartest, cleverest, wittiest audience I know, and that's me.
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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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The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.
Harlan Ellison
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My philosophy of life is that the meek shall inherit nothing but debasement, frustration, and ignoble deaths.
Harlan Ellison
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You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.
Harlan Ellison
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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.
Harlan Ellison
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Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning the end will take care of itself.
Harlan Ellison
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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'.
Harlan Ellison
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be careful of monsters with teeth
Harlan Ellison
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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.
Harlan Ellison
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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.
Harlan Ellison