A Lit Fuse, The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison Quotes

“We are all the character we make ourselves to be.”
― Nat Segaloff, A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison

“Harlan Ellison’s epitaph is of his own construction: “For a brief time I was here, and for a brief time I mattered.”246 He leaves it to potential mourners to decide whether it shows modesty or cynicism. If the former, it merely restates what he has said throughout his career: that writing is a job. He proudly calls himself a blue collar writer and has proved it no fewer than twenty-seven times by sitting down in public and pounding out stories on his portable Olympia typewriter. No theatrics, no waiting for the muse. Just demonstrating — as Mary Heaton Vorse described it — the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. If the latter, then he is rejecting the tremendous effect he has had on that most rarefied form of narrative writing, the short story. Even when he declares that his writing isn’t art, the countless awards he has won for it argue otherwise, and the equally countless reprints in literary anthologies should constitute an apotheosis.”
― Nat Segaloff, A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison

“A guy in the audience raised his hand and said, ‘I saw you on Politically Incorrect, and you got real mad at some black lady because of something about some film director,’ ” he told The Onion in a rare (for them) serious interview that same year. “I said, ‘Yeah, it was [Elia] Kazan, and the subject was how he had been denied an award from a film critics’ group because he had been a rat for the House Un-American Activities Committee.’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘HUAC! You know, HUAC?’ And he said, ‘What?’ So I had to spend half an hour explaining J. Parnell Thomas and the Hollywood Ten, and The Red Menace, and how High Noon was a protest film against the people who had ratted out others to the Committee and how On the Waterfront was Kazan’s apologia for being a narc and also how that had nothing to do with the McCarthy hearings seven years later. And this guy wasn’t an isolated case in that large gathering! They didn’t know who Elia Kazan was or what he had done that made him a pariah or who Strom Thurmond is or what a Hooverville was or why we were fighting in Korea or Wounded Knee or … hell, they barely knew Nixon. They knew McCarthy’s name but not what it was he’d done. Someone asked if he hadn’t done a good job ferreting out communists, and I said, ‘No! He never ferreted out anygoddambody! All he ever ferreted out was every bottle of booze in Congress!’ So when you’re dealing with people who know nothing, you find yourself suddenly turning into a fucking pedant instead of a storyteller. I have to educate them before I can use a trope or a reference.”224”
― Nat Segaloff, A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison

“Adds Silverberg in a phrase as dry as a deposition, “You have picked a difficult subject for a biography.”
― Nat Segaloff, A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison

“As for his White House bêtes noirs, “Nothing much has happened,” Ellison wrote in an introduction to the 1983 reprint, “nothing much except … Agnew and Nixon proved all the warnings I trumpeted about their evil were accurate.” Whether one chooses to believe that there was a conspiracy of bookstores toeing the Nixon Administration’s repressive line, at the very least one comes away realizing that the people who control the flow of information in America think that television is a far more powerful medium than movies; otherwise why would they spend so much effort controlling it?”
― Nat Segaloff, A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison

“But that didn’t mean that there wasn’t reaction, and he felt it sharply in late 1970 when Ace Books published columns one through fifty-two as The Glass Teat. Initial orders were so strong that Ace ordered another press run, and in August of that year, they contracted him to write The Other Glass Teat as soon as he’d generated enough additional columns to fill a second book. A late 1971 pub date was anticipated. Only it didn’t happen. Not only did The Other Glass Teat not come out as promised, sales of The Glass Teat suddenly dropped off sharply. An inside source in Sacramento leaked to Ellison that his name had been placed on then California Governor Ronald Reagan’s “subversives list.” The nomination had come from Richard Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro Agnew. Agnew was personally offended by Ellison’s repeated digs at his repressive policies and smarmy (and, as it turned out, hypocritical) morality. According to Ellison, word had been spread to bookstores and distributors to keep The Glass Teat off the market despite its popularity. Ace was forced to cancel their contract, telling Ellison to keep half of the advance. The embargo held until 1975 when Ace, sensing that the market had calmed, republished The Glass Teat and announced The Other Glass Teat as part of a twelve-book run of Ellison reissues and new titles.”
― Nat Segaloff, A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison

“The next time the Administration tells us how much freedom of speech and equal time there are in the old U.S.A., all together in unison leave us chant, “It ain’t equal time if Nixon gets primetime to millions and the opposition gets a soapbox on the corner.” (December 18, 1970)”
― Nat Segaloff, A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison

“(Two columns about a David Susskind panel discussion with five average people [“The Common Man”] stunned Ellison with the men’s articulation of paranoia about the “Liberal Mafia” ruining America): There were conspiracies everywhere. The Black Militant Conspiracy. The White Liberal Conspiracy. The Communist Conspiracy. The Bureaucratic Conspiracy. The Conspiracy of the Judiciary. All their troubles stem from poor people on welfare rolls and from “bleeding heart liberals” who steal from them … The time for worshipping the Common Man is past. We can no longer tolerate him, or countenance his stupidity. He is the man who keeps our air polluted, our country at war, our schools infested with police stateism, our lives on the brink of oppression, and our futures sold out for oil leases. The Common Man — the kind Susskind showed us with such sorry clarity — has to go. If we are to continue living in this doomed world, if we are to save ourselves, we must kill off the Common Man in us and bring forth the Renaissance Man. (October 17 and 25, 1969)”
― Nat Segaloff, A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison

“I’ve written it a hundred thousand times. I’m a blue-collar worker. I’m a writer, not an author. I’m accessible.” — Harlan Ellison, interviewed”
― Nat Segaloff, A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison