M. John Harrison Quotes

14 quotes in 330 categories

• After all why should our goal be the reinstatement of an illusory 'exact' relationship between events and words? If you probe in the ashes you…
• Stories pass the experienced world back and forth between them as a metaphor, until it is worn out. Only then do we realize that meaning…
• Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East’s exuberant vision of the West, the West’s uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up…
• Perception of a state is not the state.
• Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was…
• At Birkin Grif's left, his seat insecure on a scruffy packhorse, Theomeris Glyn, his only armour a steel-stressed leather cap, grumbled at the cold and…
• I think it's undignified to read for the purposes of escape. After you grow up, you should start reading for other purposes
• SF is an opportunity to have an intense relationship with your own imagination. It's a kind of drive-by poetry, trashy and addictive; it's fun. After…
• Manufacture dooms in your head and you will go mad. Reality is incontravertible. Also, it will not be anticipated.
• Identity is not negotiable. An identity you have achieved by agreement is always a prison.
• Egnaro is a secret known to everyone but yourself. It is a country or a city to which you have never been; it is an…
• Happiness and beauty are the worst things you can have in a life, because you never forget them. They go on and on ambushing you,…
• What is literature, and why do I try to write about it? I don’t know. Likewise, I don’t know why I go on living, most…
• Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.

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