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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.

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
Reader
Wittiest
Please
Wisest
Audience
Ignore
Universe
Readers
Write
Thank
Writing
Critics
Praise
Intelligent

More quotes by Harlan Ellison

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When belief in a god dies, the god dies.
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The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.
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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.
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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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I don't mind you thinking I'm stupid, but don't talk to me like I'm stupid.
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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 will live to piss in the open mouths or the open graves of my enemies, whichever comes first.
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I have no mouth. And I must scream.
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Love ain't nothing but sex misspelled.
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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.
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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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They change scapegoats at the networks more regularly than some people change socks.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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I usually say I write for the smartest, cleverest, wittiest audience I know, and that's me.
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Get a day job, make your money from that, and write to please yourself.
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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.
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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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