Essayists From The United States

"The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed."

"Take sex away from people. Make it forbidden, evil. Limit it to ritualistic breeding. Force it to back up into suppressed sadism. Then hand the people a scapegoat to hate. Let them kill a scapegoat occasionally for cathartic release. The mechanism is ages old. Tyrants used it centuries before the word "psychology" was ever invented. It works, too."

"Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do."

"How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can't say and what we can show and what we can't show — it's enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak."

"I think that science fiction, even the corniest of it, even the most outlandish of it, no matter how badly it's written, has a distinct therapeutic value because all of it has as its primary postulate that the world does change. I cannot overemphasize the importance of that idea."

"You’re so far out you’d have to masquerade to get back in."

"He is…colorful, intrusive, abrasive, irritating, hilarious, illogical, inconsistent, unpredictable, and one hell of a writer."

"Ten minutes after the event was scheduled to begin, we heard a commotion from the street as Harlan arrived. In the years that followed, I would come to understand that Commotion is just Harlan misspelled."

"Ellison was immensely talented, immensely argumentative and immensely controversial, all in equal measure. … Loved or loathed, he was undeniably one of the great figures in science fiction."

"He was demonstrating to the world the writing was a craft, that it was not an act of magic."

"They say you should never meet your heroes, and I tell you whoever said that had lousy heroes. Well, the few of you reading this fortunate enough to know Harlan know that if you scheduled a call with him, you called immediately at the specified time. Not one minute before, not one minute after. You called right. On. Time. One day I did not. Harlan read me the riot act and demanded to know what was so fucking important that I made him wait twenty minutes for me. I revealed to him that I’d discovered that day that the woman who was my geek Yoda in high school, the girl who had introduced me to numerous films, books, and video games and had been the one who put Harlan's own books into my hands for the very first time, had died at all too young an age. In that moment Harlan became one of the most gentle souls I've ever spoken with. “Oh, kid,” he said somberly, “do I ever know how that feels.” Then he consoled me for an hour, asking about her, talking at length what it was like losing Asimov and Bradbury and too many countless others. Then he revealed to me his greatest fear: that though he outlived his friends, he would be swallowed up by them, forgotten to the mists of time as little more than a footnote to so many other careers."

"I was in classes sometimes where I was the only Black person and tend to either get ignored or get petted on the head a lot. Neither is in the slightest useful so I was eager to get away from that and Harlan was not interested in doing either."

"I remember getting into Harlan Ellison's class and at one point having him say, science fiction fans read too much science fiction; and he was no doubt right, but as an adolescent that was all I read except for school work."

"I had one very good teacher who is also a writer, Harlan Ellison. He gave me a lot of help and a hard push or two when I needed them. It so happens that he writes a lot of fantasy and science fiction and was able to give me the kind of help I wouldn't have received from some English teacher."

"Harlan Ellison was a major influence, particularly his short story collection Dangerous Visions."

"Harlan is a giant among men in courage, pugnacity, loquacity, wit, charm, intelligence — indeed in everything but height."

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

"I go to bed angry every night, I wake up angry every morning. There are certain injustices in this life you’ve got to do something about. You can’t just say that you can’t fight it, or it’s too much trouble, or that you don’t have the time or the effort, or that you can’t win. Forget all that. Fight them all! I fight them all because you never know which one is the big one. You never know which you give up and then it will come back and bite you in the ass. You never look away from a mountain lion, you lock eyes and you don’t let him get behind you."

"I’ve been on my own since I was 13. I grew up having to use my wits. My parents were not wealthy. We weren’t poor, but we had a lot of meals with noodles. I was born during the Depression. My parents died pretty much penniless. Every dollar I’ve ever made I earned myself. I don’t believe in luck. Louis Pasteur said, "Chance favors the prepared mind." The smarter you are, the more you know, the better. I was the only Jew in town and I was my generation’s Bart Simpson. I knew the world could be mine."

"It is my hope that all of you who walk down the street with an iPod plugged into your head are hit by a Seven Santini Brothers moving van. I look down on a lot of you … not because you’re not terrific people, but because you’re not stupid, you’re ignorant. Big difference. Ignorance is never having seen a film by Akira Kurosawa. It’s not knowing who Guy de Maupassant is. …By the way if I miss, during the evening, saying something offensive to you, insulting your sexual proclivity, your physical disability, your race, your religion, your sex, anything, please, raise your hand. I’ll get to you, I promise. I’ll say something really nasty."

"When they dug the body out of the alley, it made even the hardened construction workers and emergency squad cops ill. Not one bone was left unbroken. The very flesh seemed to have been masticated as if by a nation of cannibal dogs. Even so, the three inured excavators who finally used winding sheets and shovels to bring the shapeless mess up from its five-foot grave agreed that it was incredible, totally past belief, that the head and face were untouched. And they all agreed that the expression on the face was not one of happiness. There were many possible explanations for that expression, but no one would have said terror, for it was not terror. They would not have said helplessness, for it was not that, either. They might have settled on a pathetic sense of loss, had their sensibilities run that deep, but none of them would have felt that the expression said, with great finality: a man may truly live in his dreams, his noblest dreams, but only, only if he is worthy of those dreams."

"Empty winds howled down out of the tundras of his soul. This was the charnel house of his finest fantasies. The burial ground of his forever. The garbage dump, the slain meat, the putrefying reality of his dreams and his Heaven. Griffin stumbled away from her, hearing the shrieks of men needlessly drowned by his vanity, hearing the voiceless accusation of the devil proclaiming cowardice, hearing the orgasm-condemnation of lust that was never love, of brute desire that was never affection, and realizing at last that these were the real substances of his nature, the true faces of his sins, the marks in the ledger of a life he had never led, yet had worshipped silently at an altar of evil. All these thoughts, as the guardian of Heaven, the keeper at the gate, the claimer of souls, the weigher of balances, advanced on him through the night."

"Griffin stood silently, watching the waterfall, sensing more than he saw, understanding more than even his senses could tell him. This was, indeed, the Heaven of his dreams, a place to spend the rest of forever, with the wind and the water and the world another place, another level of sensing, another bad dream conjured many long times before. This was reality, an only reality for a man whose existence had been not quite bad, merely insufficient, tenable but hardly enriching. For a man who had lived a life of not quite enough, this was all there ever could be of goodness and brilliance and light. Griffin moved toward the falls. The darkness grew darker."

"Heaven is what you mix all the days of your life, but you call it dreams. You have one chance to buy your Heaven with all the intents and ethics of your life. That is why everyone considers Heaven such a lovely place. Because it is dreams, special dreams, in which you exist. What you have to do is live up to them." "I—" started Griffin, but the wizard cut him off with a blink. "No, listen, please, because after this, all the magic stops, and you have to do it alone. “You create your own Heaven, and you have the opportunity to live in it, but you have to do it on your own terms, the highest terms of which you are capable. So sail this ship through the straits, navigate the shoals, find the island, overcome the foam-devil that guards the girl, win her love, and you’ve played the game on your own terms."

"What it means is: the fucking Nazis are with us again. Skinheads. David Duke. In France, Jacques Chirac…and Jean-Marie Le Pen—demagogic leader of the neo-Nazi mouthpiece group, the Nationalist Front Party. Istvan Porubsky, the racist thug of Hungary. Benito’s granddaughter Alessandra Mussolini had her Italian Social Movement. Pamyat in Russia and the Ku Klux Klan at Rulo Farm, Nebraska. Klas Lund, the 23-year-old convicted Nazi killer, leader of Sweden’s underground White Aryan Resistance, known as VAM. The British thug Ian Stuart Donaldson and his Nazi Blood and Honour Brigade. Alejandro Biodini and his anti-Semitic Argentinian Nationalist Workers’ Party. Gerhard Frey’s neo-Nazi Deutsche Volks Union; the notorious Nazi and historical revisionist Walter Ochsenberger in Austria; the 52-year-old German-Canadian anti-Semite, Nazi, and “Auschwitz liar” Ernst Zündel. Tom Metzger. The Church of the Creator. Croatian president Franjo Tudjman (“The estimate of Holocaust victims is based on biased testimony and exaggerated data”) and U.S. Presidential candidate for the Republican nomination, right-wing columnist Patrick Buchanan, beloved of the television camera’s eye, who put forth the certain theory that the Zyklon-B gas chambers at Treblinka couldn’t have functioned as “a killing apparatus.” Gordon Kahl and the Posse Comitatus. Fourth Reich skinheads. What it means is: the proper names change but the drooling lunacy is self-perpetuating. Anti-Semitism. What historian Robert S. Wistrich calls a “miasma of nightmarish paranoia, millennial fantasy, homicidal hatred and sheer political cynicism…Free-floating anti-Semitism, for which the actual presence of Jews is almost immaterial, thrives on archetypal fears, anxieties and reflexes that seem to defy any rational analysis.” What my story means is: one cannot hide, one cannot rest, one cannot relax or seek salvation in anonymity or the good offices of gods who may or may not wear their true faces. What it means is: The Nazis are with us again. Still. Yet. They never went away. And with the spread of cultural illiteracy, historical amnesia, mass communications obfuscation…their puke-coated message is out there once again. For thirty years, they had to keep their rotten bigotry to themselves, but with the passing of time they have emerged into the light, to poison the generations of rock’n’roll that have about as much of a sense of the past as a ground-worm. They can say anything, pass off any kind of obscurantism or illiterate lunacy—like UFO abductees—and there will always be dopes and jerks and illiterates and brain-damage cases who give what they cobble up some credence."

"Michelangelo gave them each a shove. Off the short dock. They sank without a ripple, borne to the infinite bottom by the weight of their severity, the heft of their sententiousness, the freighting of pecksniffian nit-picking that stuffed their otherwise wooly heads. They went straight to the bottom, wherever that was, down and down, leaving behind only a funnel of bubbles, the last of the hot air they contained."

"There are no rules. Those who are in power make up the rules. So those out of favor are bound to break them."

"Carefully avoiding her gaze, he said, “What is this, Jerri? Christ, isn’t there enough crap in the world without detouring to find a fresh supply?” He said it softly, because he had said I love you to her for two years, excluding the final seven months when he had said fuck off, never realizing they were the same phrase."

"When you’re alone, as a writer is alone, locked in single combat with the imagination, allies are rare and special."

"Before I proceed, let me reiterate: I do not write diary. A writer cannibalizes his own life and memories, yes, that is true. All we have to work with is what we know and what we dream. But nothing is more boring than kvetching in fiction. Thinly disguised personal reminiscence is not fiction. Those who, in the past, have identified me with everything that goes down in my stories have assumed I am a murderer, a transvestite, a cannibal, a sexist, a feminist, a racist, an egalitarian, an elitist, a vegetarian, an esthete, a commoner, a psychopath, a pacifist, a pederast, a womanizer, a layabout and a workaholic. Despite the fact that I have never used drugs, there is a large segment of my readership that swears I’m a heavy doper."

"“No one should ever be judged heartless because he tended to his own personal survival,” she said."

"He stopped and spun on her. “Do you think I’m a virgin? I’m not a virgin.” His vehemence pulled her back from the edge of boldness. “No, of course you’re not. I never thought such a thing.” Then she said, “Well…I am.” “Sorry,” he said, because he didn’t know the right thing to say, if there was a right thing. “Not your fault,” she said. Which was the right thing to say."

"He didn’t even like being referred to as an “author.” He once told me the difference, as he saw it, between an author and a writer. “An author [he said] is what you put on your passport, because in Europe they think a writer is a newspaperman. An author is somebody who gets his name on the spine of leatherbound volumes that are never read; a writer is someone who gets hemorrhoids from sitting on his ass all his life…writing.”"

"There was Art, and there was survival, and sometimes they were mutually exclusive."

"There are four billion people in the world. A world that has grown so complex and uncaring with systems and brutalization of individuals because of the inertia produced by those systems’ perpetuation of self, that merely to live is to be assaulted daily by circumstances."

"I don’t believe there is such a thing as “divine retribution.” The universe is neither malign nor benign. It’s just there, and it’s too busy keeping itself together to balance the scales when some feep has jerked you around. I am a strong adherent of the philosophy that one must seek retribution oneself."

"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."

"The Real World exists utterly in the Now; in a present time that seems to find the dearly remembered Past abhorrent, unbearable. And so, as this story contends, the Present tries to eradicate the Past. Please note that a distinction is drawn between change and eradication this is not one of those embalmed adorations of nostalgic sentimentality. It merely suggests for your consideration that there are treasures of the Past that we seem too quickly brutally ready to dump down the incinerator of Progress. At what cost, it suggests, do we pursue the goal of being au courant?"

"You are not alone. We are all the same, all in this fragile skin, suffering the ugliness of simply being human, or prey to the same mortal dreads. When I lecture I try to say this, to say most of the fears you invent—atomic war, multinational conspiracies, assassination paranoias, fear of ethnic types, flying saucers from Mars—those are all bullshit. I inveigh against illogical beliefs and say that the mortal dreads are the ones that drive you to crazy beliefs in Scientology, est, the power of dope, hatred of elitism and intellectual pursuits, astrology, messiahs like Sun Myung Moon or Jim Jones, fundamentalist religions. I try to tell you that fear is okay if you understand that what you fear is the same for everyone. Not the bogus oogie-boogie scares of Dan O’Bannon and Ridley Scott’s Alien, slavering creatures in the darkness that want to pierce your flesh with scorpion stinger tails and ripping jaws, but the fear of Gregor Samsa waking to discover he isn’t who he was when he went to bed; the fear of Pip in the graveyard; the fear of Huck finding his dead father on the abandoned houseboat. The fears to which we are all heir to simply because we are tiny creatures in the universe that is neither benign nor malign…it is simply enormous and unaware of us save as part of the chain of life."

"Frequently I will say something about the human condition that seems perfectly rational and proper to me, because I know we all share the same thoughts. Invariably, some feep in the audience will attempt to pillory me with a stunning accusation, “You only said that to shock!” My response is always the same: “You bet your ass, slushface. Of course I said it to shock you (or wrote it to shock you). 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 spend my life and miles of visceral material in a glorious and painful series of midnight raids against complacency. It is my lot to wake with anger every morning, to lie down at night even angrier. All in pursuit of one truth that lies at the core of every jot of fiction ever written: we are all in the same skin…but for the time it takes to read the stories I merely have the mouth.”"

"This is a test. Take notes. This will count as 3/4 of your final grade. Hints: remember, in chess, kings cancel each other out and cannot occupy adjacent squares, are therefore all-powerful and totally powerless, cannot affect each other, produce stalemate. Hinduism is a polytheistic religion; the sect of Atman worships the divine spark of life within Man; in effect saying, "Thou art God." Provisos of equal time are not served by one viewpoint having media access to two hundred million people in prime time while opposing viewpoints are provided with a soapbox on the corner. Not everyone tells the truth. Operational note: these sections may be taken out of numerical sequence: rearrange to suit yourself for optimum clarity. Turn over your test papers and begin."

"There comes a point in the downward slide of the human condition when a man ceases to be a man. He may still walk erect, but it is principally a matter of skeletal arrangement, not ethics."

"These are the sounds in the night: First, the sound of darkness, lapping at the edges of a sea of movement, itself called silence. Then, second, the fingertip-sensed sound of the cyclical movement of the universe as it gnaws its way through the dust-film called Time. And last, the animal sounds of two people making love. The moist sounds of two bodies in concert."

"I’m afraid I felt a straight pin of jealousy. Perfection does that to me."

"Posing the question: does the god of love use underarm deodorant, vaginal spray and fluoride toothpaste?"

"Gods can do anything. They fear nothing: they are gods. But there is one rule, one Seal of Solomon that can confound a god, and to which all gods pay service, to the letter: When belief in a god dies, the god dies. When the last acolyte renounces his faith and turns to another deity, the god ceases to be."

"Fear in the hands of a motion picture maker, like a shotgun in the hands of a baby, need not necessarily be properly aimed to make a helluva bang. But to hit the target dead-on, requires maturity and thought."

"It hardly needs more demonstration than a flicking on of the TV set to prove that if left to its own devices, the taste of the mass—per Sturgeon’s Law—will inevitably sink to the lowest possible common denominator."

"He thought he could make intelligent films for intelligent people. This is a concept largely ignored in Hollywood, these days, the producers of the Stanley Shapiro/Ross Hunter cadre, who make movies as intellectually demanding as a Giant Golden Book, and who seemingly visualize their audiences as microcephalics fit only to salivate over the constantly-imminent deflowering of Doris Day, or the shade of puce in a Jean Louis gown."

"Since the first night of Man, hunkered down hairy and hungry by the primeval lightning-borne food fire, fear has been the prime mover. Forget momma love and posterity and men’s unquenchable curiosity. Fear is the principle mode of locomotion of homo sapiens."