Harlan Ellison

No Doors, No Windows

For Years of Friendship,

for Forcing Open Doors and

Busting Out Windows,

This One, with Love, for

JOE L. and CHARLOTTE HENSLEY

“I feel it’s tremendously satisfying to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion; if you’ve [written] a picture correctly, in terms of its emotional impact, the Japanese audience should scream at the same time as the Indian audience.”

Alfred Hitchcock

Introduction: Blood / Thoughts

“Writing has nothing much to do with pretty manners, and less to do with sportsmanship or restraint …

“Every fictioneer re-invents the world because the facts, things or people of the received world are unacceptable. Every fiction writer dreams of imposing his invention upon the world and winning the world’s acclaim. (Such dreams are known as delusions of grandeur in pathology but tolerated as expressions of would-be genius in bookstores and libraries.) Every writer begins as a subversive, if in nothing more than the antisocial means by which he earns his keep. Finally, every fantasist who cannibalizes himself knows that misfortune is his friend, that grief feeds and sharpens his fancy, that hatred is as sufficient a spur to creation as love (and a world more common) and that without an instinct for lunacy he will come to nothing.”

GEOFFREY WOLFF, 1975

What are we to make of the mind of humanity? What are we to think of the purgatory in which dreams are born, from whence come the derangements that men call magic because they have no other names for smoke or fog or hysteria? What are we to dwell upon when we consider the forms and shadows that become stories? Must we dismiss them as fever dreams, as expressions of creativity, as purgatives? Or may we deal with them even as the naked ape dealt with them: as the only moments of truth a human calls throughout a life of endless lies.



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