memories of those who cared

Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we are, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.

Harlan Ellison
Paladin of the Lost Hour

So you want to write…

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.

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.

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.

Harlan Ellison
Harlan Ellison on writing

Good literature

Good literature very simply is that which uplifts an enriches in some way, that which gives you an insight into the human condition so that you understand that we all live in the same skin and we are all heir to the same fears and joys and that makes you want to be a part of the human race. That’s good literature to me.

Harlan Ellison
Ellison on Crafting Short Stories
NBC Today Show, 24 April 1981