Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of self-satisfaction in writing over seeking external approval.
Harlan Ellison encourages writers to appreciate both their supporters and critics, but ultimately to focus on their own desires and standards in their work. By advocating for writing that pleases oneself, it highlights the notion that true creativity comes from authenticity and personal expression, rather than the pursuit of validation from others.
In practice
During a writing workshop to inspire aspiring authors.
People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.
The more you know, the more unflinchingly you deny casual beliefs and Accepted Wisdom when it flies in the face of reality, the more carefully you observe the world and its people around you, the better chance you have of writing something meaningful and well-crafted.
When you're all alone out there, on the end of the typewriter, with each new story a new appraisal by the world of whether you can still get it up or not, arrogance and self-esteem and deep breathing are all you have. It often looks like egomania. I assure you it's the bold coverup of the absolutely terrified.
I think [religion] is presumptuous and I think it is silly, because it makes you believe that you are less than what you can be. As long as you can blame everything on some unseen deity, you donβt ever have to be responsible for your own behavior.
Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you β as if you haven't been told a million times already β that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.
The trap into which all writers have, will, or should fall into, of writing The Great American Watchamacallit, is such an uncluttered and inviting one that from time to time I'm sure even the greatest have to pull themselves up short by the Shift key to remind themselves that it is story first that they should write.
There was a beauty in the trash of the alleys which I had never noticed before; my vision seemed sharpened, rather than impaired. As I walked along it seemed to me that the flattened beer cans and papers and weeds and junk mail had been arranged by the wind into patterns; these patterns, when I scrutinized them, lay distributed so as to comprise a visual language.
I give you soul. I give you wisdom and light and music and a bit of laughter. Also, I am the world's greatest horseplayer.
When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.
It doesn't bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs - because at least they're looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.
With Bound, we wanted to pull at conventions, because you begin to wonder, Why do these stereotypes exist? Where do they come from? You use that as the subtext.
My introduction to art history was like everybody else's. You see an art history book that has works by Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Yes, these things are great. But I don't see a reflection of myself in any of these things I'm looking at.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.