M. John Harrison Quotes.

1. "What is literature, and why do I try to write about it? I don’t know. Likewise, I don’t know why I go on living, most of the time. But this not knowing is precisely what I want to preserve. As readers, the closest way we can engage with a literary work is to protect its indeterminacy; to return ourselves and it to a place that precludes complete recognition. Really, when I’m reading, all I want is to stand amazed in front of an unknown object at odds with the world."
- Quote by M. John Harrison

2. "The worst thing in the world is to be inside yourself, you don't even want to be rescued."
- Quote by M. John Harrison

3. "I think it’s undignified to read for the purposes of escape…. If you read for escape you will never try to change your life, or anyone else’s. It’s a politically barren act, if nothing else. The overuse of imaginative fiction enables people to avoid the knowledge that they are actually alive."
- Quote by M. John Harrison

4. "Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil 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, worldbuilding 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. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid."
- Quote by M. John Harrison

5. "Charcoal grey frogs with viridescent eyes croaked as the column floundered between the pools. Beneath the greasy surface of the water unidentifiable reptiles moved slowly and sinuously. Dragonflies whose webby wings spanned a foot or more hummed and hovered between the sedges: their long, wicked bodies glittered bold green and ultramarine; they took their prey on the wing, pouncing with an audible snap of jaws on whining, ephemeral mosquitoes and fluttering moths of april blue and chevrolet cerise."
- Quote by M. John Harrison

6. "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."
- M. John Harrison, The Course of the Heart

7. "…there is endless despair at the centre of every narcissistic self-portrait."
- M. John Harrison, The Course of the Heart

8. "Perception of a state is not the state."
- M. John Harrison, Nova Swing

9. "When I was little, she thought, I wanted nothing except to stop travelling. I wanted time for each new thing, each new feeling, to be held properly in suspension until it could be joined by the next. Given the chance I could easily hold all those beautiful things together. I could be like a box in which they would be held new forever. Instead, everything aged and changed. People too."
- M. John Harrison, Nova Swing

10. "It's 2444. We're all someone."
- M. John Harrison, Nova Swing