"Scientology is bullshit! Man, I was there the night L. Ron Hubbard invented it, for Christ's sakes! … We were sitting around one night... who else was there? Alfred Bester, and Cyril Kornbluth, and Lester del Rey, and Ron Hubbard, who was making a penny a word, and had been for years. And he said "This bullshit's got to stop!" He says, "I gotta get money." He says, "I want to get rich". And somebody said, "why don't you invent a new religion? They're always big." We were clowning! You know, "Become Elmer Gantry! You'll make a fortune!" He says, "I'm going to do it."

“I’ve been on my own since I was 13. I grew up having to use my wits. My parents were not wealthy. We weren’t poor, but we had a lot of meals with noodles. I was born during the Depression. My parents died pretty much penniless. Every dollar I’ve ever made I earned myself. I don’t believe in luck. Louis Pasteur said, "Chance favors the prepared mind." The smarter you are, the more you know, the better. I was the only Jew in town and I was my generation’s Bart Simpson. I knew the world could be mine.”

“I go to bed angry every night, I wake up angry every morning. There are certain injustices in this life you’ve got to do something about. You can’t just say that you can’t fight it, or it’s too much trouble, or that you don’t have the time or the effort, or that you can’t win. Forget all that. Fight them all! I fight them all because you never know which one is the big one. You never know which you give up and then it will come back and bite you in the ass. You never look away from a mountain lion, you lock eyes and you don’t let him get behind you.”

“The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.”

“He had writer's block once. It was the worst ten minutes of his life.”

“For a brief time I was here; and for a brief time I mattered.”

“Writers, Other Notables React to the Death of Harlan Ellison" in The New York Times”