- Harlan Ellison: Most writers I know run that idiotic number about "Oh, I like to have written but I don't like to write. It's hard work."... Of course it's hard work. If it weren't hard work, everybody would be doing it. And the better you do it, the harder the work is... Art is supposed to be hard.
- Harlan Ellison: I want to have your children.
- Robin Williams: Yeah, well, I've got three, I'll send one over.
- Harlan Ellison: People say to me, even Susan says to me, My God, does everything make you angry? I said, yeah, everything makes me angry. And they say, you know, you should get a little mellow. And I say, oh really? Gee, I had never thought of that.
- Harlan Ellison: "I'm entitled to my opinion"? NO! I've got news for you, schmuck! You're entitled to your INFORMED opinion!
- Harlan Ellison: Are
- [other writers]
- Harlan Ellison: any less the media whore than I? I think not. Nobody's offered to buy their soul. I sell my soul, but at the highest rates.
- Harlan Ellison: [pointing to metal shelving] These are my extra typewriters.
- Robin Williams: [laughing loudly] This is like an ammunition dump!
- Harlan Ellison: Well, yeah, I use typewriters. They're all Olympias, and I have all my typewriter ribbons in the refrigerator.
- Ronald D. Moore: Television is a lot of compromise, especially running a show over the course of a season. It's about managing compromise and picking battles. "I'm going to fight for this and I'll let that go." And I don't know that that's in Harlan's makeup... I think he fights all the battles, because I think he thinks all the battles are worth fighting. "Sure, you could compromise on that, but then it's gonna suck."
- Harlan Ellison: And my mother said - and I remember this as if it were yesterday - my mother with a washcloth in her hand and me standing at the sink, she said, "You must have said something to get them angry." And it was an icicle just jammed into my chest. That my own mother - and with cause! It was not as if I was the greatest kid in the world. I was a troublemaker! I was a brat! I was a big-mouth pain in the ass! But that my own mother would not understand - at that moment I had what, now at age seventy-two I understand, was an enormous epiphany, which is: I really cannot support it, I cannot bear it, when people laugh at me.
- Typewriter Sticker: As an Artist I am Exempt from Shit.