“Harlan was not just a great fantasist and/or science fiction writer; he was a great writer, period. When he was at the top of his form, from the late 60s through the 70s and well into the 80s, there was no finer short-story writer in all of English literature.”

“You should buy this book immediately, because this is a book that knows perfectly that you are seething inside.”

“In his stories of fantasy and horror, [Ellison] strikes closest to all those things that horrify and amuse us (sometimes both at the same time) in our present lives…Most of all, we sense outrage and anger—as with the best Ellison stories, we sense personal involvement, and have a feeling that Ellison is not so much telling the tale as he is jabbing it viciously out of its hiding place. It is the feeling that we are walking over a lot of jagged glass in thin shoes, or running across a minefield in the company of a lunatic.”

“Categories are too small—even the catch-all category of science fiction—to describe Harlan Ellison. Lyric poet, satirist, explorer of odd psychological corners, moralist, one-line comedian, purveyor of pure horror and of black comedy; he is all these and more.”

“A furiously prolific and cantankerous writer [who] looked at storytelling as a ‘holy chore,’ which he pursued zealously for more than sixty years. His output includes more than 1,700 short stories and articles, at least 100 books, and dozens of screenplays and television scripts…ranked with eminent science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov.”

“Harlan Ellison was, after all, one of the most interesting humans on Earth. He was one of the greatest and most influential science fiction writers alive. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, lectured to college kids, visited with death row inmates, and once mailed a dead gopher to a publisher. Ellison brought a literary sensibility to sci-fi at a time when the entire establishment was allergic to any notion of art. To say he was one-of-a-kind would be trite, and he would likely hate that. What he was, was a legend.”

“There’s a real power to the way he uses the language and how he draws pictures in your mind.”

“You see Ellison’s unswerving social conscience throughout his fiction and critical essays…forcefully and eloquently—and at some length—lamenting the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment and railing against the scourge of misogynistic ‘knife-kill’ films.”

“The words—there is an attention to the words. There is an attention to the sound of the words. You’re reading them in your head, and they sing.”