Dangerous Visions (The Dangerous Visions Series)

by Harlan Ellison

the largest anthology of speculative fiction ever published of all original stories, and easily one of the largest of any kind, was constructed along specific lines of revolution.

Writing for the trunk is masturbation, so saith del Rey.

The delusion that genius and madness are but opposing faces of the same rare coin is one to which most writers subscribe, as a cop-out. It allows them to be erratic, beat their wives, demand fresh coffee at six ayem, come in late with manuscripts, default on their obligations, laze around reading paperback novels on the pretext that they are “researching,” pick up stakes and move when things get too regimented, snarl and snap at fans, be tendentious or supercilious.

You couldn’t put a thing over these chimp drivers.

how odd it seems to me that science fiction fans, the ones who choose to exist in dream worlds of flying skyways, cities of wonder, marvelous inventions, dilating doors, tri-vid, and “feelies,” are the ones who most vocally despise modern television.

If the watching was casual and the safety of the boy only probable . . . he had still carried out the formal, social necessities of child care.

You will be a man, they had told him, and the pride of humanity is that we are not bound by instinct and reflex; we are free because we can master ourselves.

Readers ought to know that writers are not responsible for the opinions and behavior of their characters. But many people don’t.

Everybody views the world from his particular philosophical

report what he sees is, inevitably, propagandizing. But as a rule the propaganda lies below the surface. This is twice true of science fiction, which begins by transmuting reality to frank unreality.

the finger of warning jammed directly in the eye or up the nose of the reader.

In Moderan we are not often between wars,

The act of compiling most anthologies (I observed, prior to starting work on the volume before you) is ludicrously easy.

“Buggerly bangin’ bumpin’ bitchballs.”

a formidable woman with a black mustache and pre-eminent bosom. She received me with dignity, camomile tea, and a crepe-fringed portrait of her husband.

I have always prided myself on an uncanny rapport with poodles

Jim Ballard, who seems to me to write peculiarly Ballardian stories—tales difficult to pin down as to one style or one theme or one approach but all very personally trademarked Ballard—is

Few things are as drab as a down-at-heel circus, but this one was so travel-worn and dejected as to deny them the chance of making any profit whatever.

“We’ve been slaves to our tools since the first caveman made the first knife to help him get his supper. After that there was no going back, and we built till our machines were ten million times more powerful than ourselves. We gave ourselves cars when we might have learned to run; we made airplanes when we might have grown wings; and then the inevitable. We made a machine our God.”

Only a free society, he thought, can produce the technology that makes tyranny possible

he successively cornered the market in Mickey Mantle, Willy Mays and Pee Wee Reese and became the J. P. Morgan of baseball cards.

He converted a tribe of Borneo headhunters to Rosicrucianism.

20th Century Pox.

bravura writing that breaks rules most writers only suspect exist.

and the spirit of St. Detroit sat in its driver’s seat,

Toulouse-Lautrec once said, “One should never meet a man whose work one admires. The man is always so much less than the work.” Painfully, almost always this is true.