The Glass Teat Quotes

“Ours is a society so immersed in the sea of video reactions that there are little old ladies out there who know Hoss Cartwright is more real than their next door neighbors. Everyone of value to them is an image. A totem. A phosphor-dot wraith whose hurts and triumphs are created from the magic of a scenarist’s need to make the next payment on his Porsche. (I recommend a book titled Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad, for a more complete, and horrifying analysis of this phenomenon. It’s an Avon paperback, so it shouldn’t trouble you too much to pick it up.) But because of this acceptance of the strangers who appear on the home screen, ours has become a society where shadow and reality intermix to the final elimination of any degree of rational selectivity on the part of those whose lives are manipulated: by the carnivores who flummox them, and the idols they choose to worship. I don’t know that there’s any answer to this. If we luck out and we get a John Kennedy or a Leonard Nimoy (who, strangely enough, tie in to one another by the common denominator of being humane), then we can’t call it a bad thing. But if we wind up with a public image that governs us as Ronald Reagan and Joe Pyne govern us, then we are in such deep trouble the mind turns to aluminum thinking of it.”
― Harlan Ellison, The Glass Teat: Essays

“Ellison’s Theorem: the further right your position, the less telling your satire. A corollary of which is that you can’t lampoon anywhere near where you stand, because you’d annihilate your own troops.”
― Harlan Ellison, The Glass Teat: Essays

“That’s what happens, friends. It gets so damned depressing, coming up against the cultural hari-kiri we keep committing, that cynicism becomes the only supportable attitude. And then the kids prove they’ve got it. Even I, anxious to give them every possible point, begin to suspect the rot goes from top to bottom, young and old alike. And then the kids do me in. They come up with solid gold, and make me feel like the idiot I certainly am, on occasion.”
― Harlan Ellison, The Glass Teat: Essays

“The only difference, I suppose, between them and me is that I never set out to write shit. (That is: merely sufficient, average.) And of all the crimes that may be attributed to me—numbering among them rudeness, lechery, viciousness, imprudence and disgusting egocentricity—the one that can never be laid on me is the one epitomized by the line, “I just write what they want, by Tuesday, take the money and run.”
― Harlan Ellison, The Glass Teat: Essays