“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.” KnowsWorldWayWantWritingTryingReadingLiteratureKnowingFrontsObjectsGoes OnReturnReaderProtectRecognitionPreservesOddsClosestNot KnowingAmazedLiterary Works Author:M. John Harrison
“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.” WayDreamCitiesVisionWestEastParisPrimeSiteImitationUneasyHallucinationsViennaBudapest Author:M. John Harrison
“Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was ominous becomes ordinary; what was bizarre, quotidian. Unless you simply keep upping the ante, piling on the bullshit, the only way to revive things is to switch perspectives as quickly as you can.” WayPerspectiveReaderOrdinaryBullshitGlimpseBizarreTransportThresholdReviveOminous Author:M. John Harrison
“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.” WayKindLittlesUseOpportunityFunImaginationMetaphorIntenseContemporaryObsessionTypicalImaginativeArtifacts Author:M. John Harrison
