M. John Harrison Quotes
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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 unknown language. At the same time it is like being cuckolded, or plotted against. It is part of the universe of events which will never wholly reveal itself to you: a conspiracy the barest outline of which, once visible, will gall you forever.
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She had impressed him as capable of behaviour even more meaningless than most human beings. He had watched her kill her own people with a ferocity that betrayed real grief. But she was someone, he had decided early, who struggled harder with life than she needed to: this he respected, even admired.
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Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.
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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, presumably until you die.
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World-building numbs the reader's ability to fulfill their part of the bargain because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done. Above all, world-building is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn't there.
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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 that, for me, it's an opportunity to explore that kind of imaginative artifact from inside, and use a little camped-up contemporary science as a way of generating new metaphors around my typical obsessions.
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People think it’s a failure to live alone. But it isn’t. The failure is to live with someone because you can’t face anything else.
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Generally, it was impossible to understand the motives of aliens.
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Writing's like gambling. Unpredictable and sporadic successes make you more addicted, not less.
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Manufacture dooms in your head and you will go mad. Reality is incontravertible. Also, it will not be anticipated.
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I've never been to the Himalayas, and I'm not really interested in them. I'm more interested in a dirty old quarry in Lancashire, and by god, they can be dirty.
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A good ground rule for writing in any genre is, start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide - then write that.
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Anna accumulated things as a way of insulating herself against her own thoughts.
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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 the earliness of the hour, and cursed the flint hearts of city girls.
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I think it's undignified to read for the purposes of escape. After you grow up, you should start reading for other purposes
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'Everywhere you look it unpacks to infinity. What you look for, you find. And you people can have it. All of it.'The comfortable generosity of this offer puzzled Kearney, so he decided to ignore it. It seemed meaningless anyway.
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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 is an act. We must repossess it, instant to instant in our lives.
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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 city; a city almost completely faked; a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna — the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation.