“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”
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Author detail
Harlan Ellison was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a Jewish-American family. His family moved to Painesville, Ohio, but returned to Cleveland in 1949 after the death of his father. As a child, he performed in minstrel shows, and frequently ran away from home, taking odd jobs. He attended Ohio State University but was expelled after 18 months for hitting a professor who had denigrated his writing ability. He moved to New York City in 1955 to become a science fiction writer. Over the next two years, he published more than 100 short stories and articles. In 1957, he joined a street gang in Brooklyn as research for his novel Web of the City/Rumble and short story collection The Deadly Streets. In the late 1950s, he wrote erotic fiction under the pseudonym Cordwainer Bird. Later, he used the pseudonym for works that he felt were warped beyond his original intention by editors or producers. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1957 and returned to New York in 1960, before moving to Chicago, to write for Rogue magazine and work as an editor for Regency Books. In 1962, he moved to California and began writing for Hollywood film studios in. His first screenplay was for the film The Oscar. He also wrote scripts for television shows such as The Flying Nun, Burke's Law, Route 66, The Outer Limits, Star Trek, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Cimarron Strip. During the late 1960s, he also wrote a column about political and social issues in television for the Los Angeles Free Press titled "The Glass Teat." Ellison has won ten Hugo Awards, four Nebula Awards, and five Bram Stoker Awards (presented by the Horror Writers Association) including the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. He has written nine novels, hundreds of short stories, and many articles and essays. He continues to write from his home in Los Angeles, California with Susan, his fifth wife.
Quotes
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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.”
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“Love ain't nothing but sex misspelled.”
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“I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleas...”
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“The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.”
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“It is not merely enough to love literature if one wishes to spend one's life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing w...”
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“The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility; that is my burden. And even I grow tired.”
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“The only thing worth writing about is people. People. Human beings. Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, insight by insight. If you do not do it, the story is a f...”
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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 mis...”
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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...”
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“Writing a novel is like going a great distance to take a small shit.”
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“I mean, what do you do, when you find that things are not what you were taught they’re supposed to be? What do you do with the desperation that boils up from your stomach when you know there...”
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“Time is like a river flowing endlessly through the universe. And if you poled your flatboat in that river you might fight your way against the current and travel upstream into the past. Or g...”
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“Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.”
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“Who wants a library full of books you've already read?”
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“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.'”
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“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.”
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“I'm real tall when I stand on my charisma.”
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“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.”
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“Science fiction and fantasy is a kind of literature that embodies the highest aspirations of the human race.”
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“Nobody escapes age and gravity.”
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