SF is an opportunity to have an intense relationship with your own imagination. It's a kind of drive-by poetry, trashy and addictive; it's fun. After that, for me, it's an opportunity to explore that kind of imaginative artifact from inside, and use a little camped-up contemporary science as a way of generating new metaphors around my typical obsessions.
M. John HarrisonWritings like gambling. Unpredictable and sporadic successes make you more addicted, not less.
M. John HarrisonManufacture dooms in your head and you will go mad. Reality is incontravertible. Also, it will not be anticipated.
M. John HarrisonAt Birkin Grif's left, his seat insecure on a scruffy packhorse, Theomeris Glyn, his only armour a steel-stressed leather cap, grumbled at the cold and the earliness of the hour, and cursed the flint hearts of city girls.
M. John HarrisonHappiness and beauty are the worst things you can have in a life, because you never forget them. They go on and on ambushing you, presumably until you die.
M. John HarrisonAfter all why should our goal be the reinstatement of an illusory 'exact' relationship between events and words? If you probe in the ashes you will never learn anything about the fire: by the time the ashes can be handled the meaning has passed on. Every adventure is a cup so empty it can be drunk from again and again and again. Every adventure is so perfect it verges on silence.
M. John Harrison