Grant Morrison Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Grant Morrison.
Famous Quotes By Grant Morrison
Individual humans are not super, but the organism of which we are all tiny cellular parts is most certainly that. The life-form that's so big we forget it's there, that turns minerals on its planet into tools to touch the infinite black gap between stars or probe the obliterating pressures at the bottom of the oceans. We are already part of a superbeing, a monster, a god, a living process that is so all encompassing that it is to an individual life what water is to a fish. We are cells in the body of a three-billion-year-old life-form whose roots are in the Precambrian oceans and whose genetic wiring extends through the living structures of everything on the planet, connecting everything that has ever lived in one immense nervous system. — Grant Morrison
But where in all of this description is the essential chair? Have we yet come even close to a full description of it? Did we even mention that several hundred years ago, it wasn't a chair but a tree? Where is it now? Here? Or in memory.
We cannot even fully describe a chair and yet we say "I am." "I am ... ". Understand. There is no "I am." Nothing "is." Try to describe all that you are. Simultaneously discern the logical flaw in what I've just said. Now! Feel the white flame. — Grant Morrison
Writers and artists build by hand little worlds that they hope might effect change in real minds, in the real world where stories are read. A story can make us cry and laugh, break our hearts, or make us angry enough to change the world. — Grant Morrison
Sometimes I pretend not to look at my own characters, because that's like different people getting off with your girlfriend or something. — Grant Morrison
All the comics are sigils. "Sigil" as a word is out of date. All this magic stuff needs new terminology because it's not what people are being told it is at all. It's not all this wearying symbolic misdirection that's being dragged up from the Victorian Age, when no-one was allowed to talk plainly and everything was in coy poetic code. The world's at a crisis point and it's time to stop bullshitting around with Qabalah and Thelema and Chaos and Information and all the rest of the metaphoric smoke and mirrors designed to make the rubes think magicians are 'special' people with special powers. It's not like that. Everyone does magic all the time in different ways. "Life" plus "significance" = magic. — Grant Morrison
Cassandra Nova impersonating Xavier: Imagine the responsibility of all that destructive potential. The power to crack the firmament and extinguish suns ... Imagine that in the wrong hands. — Grant Morrison
Your character that you create in your writing not only represents who you are, but also represents a number of people who you've met along the way. — Grant Morrison
My art school rejection letter arrived as a cold manila fist that closed around my fragile hopes [ ... ] The fear was practically edible. Nothing would happen unless I get out and make it happen.
Then, as if handing me the keys to the jet pack, my dad bought me a typewriter and a taped message to the inside of its case: 'Son- the world is waiting to hear from you'. — Grant Morrison
[He] ... watches the Joker rising from his wheelchair, the way a rabbit watches car headlights bearing down, unable to move a single, spotlit muscle. The madman's limbs appear to unlatch as though some psychotic god has chosen to give life to a complicated Swiss Army knife. The Joker's head rotates ... the green lasers of his eyes target the keys at the big man's belt, and he shakes his head. — Grant Morrison
A comic will always be more 'personal' than a DVD or CD, both of which require electronic 'players' to decode their content. With comics, the reader is the player so the engagement with the material is always more fundamental and dynamic. Reading comics is a much less passive activity than consuming CDs and DVDs. — Grant Morrison
If this book has made any point clear, I hope it's that things don't have to be real to be true. Or vice versa. — Grant Morrison
We tell our children they're trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions, then raise a disapproving eyebrow when, in response, they dress in black, cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, gorge themselves, or kill one another. — Grant Morrison
I run blindly through the madhouse ... And I cannot even pray ... For I have no God. — Grant Morrison
I tend to only read comics written by friends or people I've known. And I'm not a great comic reader. — Grant Morrison
I'm at a stage in my career where I don't expect or get too much editorial input into what I'm doing. I have a proven track record of success, so my editors are willing to cut me some slack even when a particular approach is not to their personal taste. — Grant Morrison
Truth speaks best in the language of poetry and symbolism, I think. — Grant Morrison
I'm lucky to have a job doing something I really love to do, and I'm happy to accept the pressures of relentless deadlines or reader expectations as necessary evils. It's probably not as stressful as mining coal or leading men into battle. — Grant Morrison
It's not so much that history is simply cyclical, it seems to progress via recursive, repeated fractal patterns with minute variations. — Grant Morrison
I think any writer coming on to 'Batman' should at least attempt to do their own definitive version. What it means to them. Whatever they think that symbol or character can say. — Grant Morrison
Why am I in Hell? It hurts. It hurts all the time. Why am I in Hell? I just want to go home and lie on the bed the way I used to. Please take me home. — Grant Morrison
I use everything. Turning life into stories is how I make sense of my experience. No matter how weird or disturbing or upsetting to me personally, it all finds its way in there. — Grant Morrison
I see now the virtue in madness, for this country knows no law nor any boundary. I pity the poor shades confined to the Euclidean prison that is sanity — Grant Morrison
Ours is an overpopulated, under educated, shithole in the throes of mass extinctions - it's a wonderful world. — Grant Morrison
I thought I could capture the stories of the city on paper. I thought I could write about the horrors of the city. Horror stories you see. I tell you I didn't have to look far for material. Everywhere I looked, there were stories hidden there in the dark corners ... I wrote and still there were more ... No one would publish them. 'Too horrible,' they said. 'Sick mind,' they said. I thought I could write about the horrors of the city but the horror is too big and it goes on forever. — Grant Morrison
Unlike novel characters, comic book characters last an eternity. When a character is changed beyond recognition, there's no longer the merchandising aspect. — Grant Morrison
One must commit acts of the highest treason only when dressed in the most resplendent finery. — Grant Morrison
Whatever you do, make sure you go right to the top, because you sure as hell can't piss upwards on people. — Grant Morrison
So I sang out the barbarous words - karaoke from Hell. — Grant Morrison
We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be. — Grant Morrison
The only thing that made me, or any of us, special was that no one in the whole of history would ever see the universe exactly the same way any other of us saw it. — Grant Morrison
I can always see ways to improve what I've done. At the same time, knowing it's all an ongoing life's work allows me to be less precious about blind alleys, failed experiments, and misfires. — Grant Morrison
I'm the evil mastermind behind the scenes. I'm the wicked puppeteer who pulls the strings and makes you dance. I'm your writer. — Grant Morrison
Sometimes ... sometimes I think the Asylum is a head. We're inside a huge head that dreams us all into being. Perhaps it's your head, Batman. Arkham is a looking glass ... and we are you. — Grant Morrison
Seven actors have played Batman on the big screen, and if you can name all seven without reading any further, your youth has been wasted. — Grant Morrison
I didn't quit drinking. I stopped drinking shitty alcohol with assholes. And that, my friend, was the healthiest choice I've ever made. — Grant Morrison
Only nothing is impossible. — Grant Morrison
The thing that's been exciting about 'Superman' is to see how the character has developed through generations. — Grant Morrison
He felt the hot impact of bullets. He heard the sound of chopping meat. He thought 'is that me?' ... and then he opened his eyes. — Grant Morrison
Look at it, Dane. Look at the city and the world in its proud array, like a cask of jewels laid open for you. It'll offer you everything you ever wanted but it's just pictures on billboards; dream cars, dream women, dream houses.
Time to wake up now and say goodbye.
Remember, Dane: there's other worlds out there. It's only empty air here. Jump out of the world, jump to the place I showed you and you'll not fall.
Are you ready? Are you ready to jump right off the edge of everything? — Grant Morrison
Madness is born in the blood. It is my birthright. — Grant Morrison
It's hard for me to believe that a shy, bespectacled college graduate like Brad Meltzer who's a novelist and a father is a really setting out to be weirdly misogynistic. — Grant Morrison
These characters were like twelve-bar blues or other chord progressions. Given the basic parameters of Batman, different creators could play very different music. — Grant Morrison
Consciousness, rather than being something that we have, is something we participate in. — Grant Morrison
I don't ignore continuity, and try my best to stick as closely to the current status quo as possible, but it's not my primary concern when I start a story. — Grant Morrison
I'm a false icon! The media collaborate in promoting my superficial lifestyle as somehow more valid, more worthy of attention than your real lives! - Gideon Stargrave — Grant Morrison
I don't like to think of my readership as 'fans,' a word which has always suggested a kind of power relationship I'm uncomfortable with. — Grant Morrison
It's salt. Why don't you sprinkle some on me, honey? Aren't I just good enough to eat? — Grant Morrison
Your head's like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune's all we are. — Grant Morrison
I've always felt I had more in common with the modernist approach than with postmodernism, but I can see where the connection might arise - and to be honest, I'm no academic, so I tend to use these words, like in Alice In Wonderland, to mean what I want them to mean rather than what they actually do mean. — Grant Morrison
mmmmen stink! bossss stink! hungry — Grant Morrison
Kipling: Where's your sense of humor?
Rebis: We're working on reconstructing it ... — Grant Morrison
Batman knew what it was like to trip balls without seriously losing his shit, and that savoir faire added another layer to his outlaw sexiness and alluring aura of decadence and wealth. — Grant Morrison
Who needs girls when you've got comics? — Grant Morrison
Actually, it's as if [Superman is] more real than we are. We writers come and go, generations of artists leave their interpretations, and yet something persists, something that is always Superman. — Grant Morrison
It's stupid, I know, but I care. All the things that meant so much when we were young. Under the blankets late at night, listening to long-distance radio. All those things lost now or broken. Can you remember? Can you remember that feeling? Perhaps I ought to go to a doctor. — Grant Morrison
Einstein was wrong! IM the speed of like CRACKING through shivery rainbows and GOD the sky whirls and withers like a melting RAINBOW! — Grant Morrison
Then I reminded myself that all intelligent children suffer bad dreams. — Grant Morrison
But a far more virulent strain survived. It's having sex with your thoughts. You'll give birth to increasingly more monstrous ideas. — Grant Morrison
It's always interesting to see what the real enthusiasts think, but they're rarely representative of the tastes of the wider audience, so I tend to write for myself, for an imagined smart 14-year-old, and for a couple of friends who are still big comics fans. — Grant Morrison
Superman loves everyone. He's like Jesus except he punches people. — Grant Morrison
Routine is important, i think.a good routine diverts the mind from morbid imaginings. — Grant Morrison
He read me extracts from a medical journal describing the progress of a staphylococcus aureus infection. And then he pleasured me with a potato. — Grant Morrison
The interior of our skulls contains a portal to infinity. — Grant Morrison
Amid all the bangs and the drama and the grand passions, it's kindness and just ordinary goodness that stands out in the end. — Grant Morrison
Words are ugly when they travel in packs. — Grant Morrison
Gayness is built into Batman. I'm not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There's just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he's intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay. — Grant Morrison
I won't tell you again! Don't look back! In hell you never look back! — Grant Morrison
Abandon the 'I', because it's a lie. — Grant Morrison
And that's why people read comics, to get away from the way life works, which is quite cruel and unheroic and ends in death. — Grant Morrison
It's always the same with lost people; you start out looking for them, and you end up losing yourself. — Grant Morrison
Look at us! Are we not proof that there is no good, no evil, no truth, no reason? Are we not proof that the universe is a drooling idiot with no fashion sense - Mr Nobody on the fundamental philosophy of the Brotherhood of DADA — Grant Morrison
Burnout is grist to the mill. I write every day, for most of the day, so it's just about turning into metaphor whatever's going on in my life, in the world, and in my head. Every nightmare, every moment of grief or joy or failure, is a moment I can convert into cash via words. — Grant Morrison
Of course I'm a threat. Why? Did you think for a moment that I wasn't? - Emma Frost — Grant Morrison
Doomed planet.
Desperate scientists.
Last hope.
Kindly couple. — Grant Morrison
I have to confess I'm not a huge comics fan in the wider sense of comics as an art form. — Grant Morrison
With Marvel and DC, you're working with their pre-established fictional universes and characters. At those places, you're working with characters who will outlive you and maybe your children and your childern's children. Batman will outlive me, Spider-Man will outlive me, the Avengers will outlive me, and so it goes. — Grant Morrison
To know that we are only angels weighed down by filth, free of guilt? The bacteria in our bellies are responsible for the farts which shame us, tiny monsters shitting in their billions all over our pure skin create the acid reek of "our" sweat. And Slade: when the "inner voices" tell us we're unworthy or instruct us to "love" and "hate," despite our best instincts ... are these incessant distracting thoughts our own? Or do we only hear the voice of the eternal germ screaming in our heads? — Grant Morrison
I'm a fan myself, so I try to write the kind of comics I want to read. — Grant Morrison
Ah, I feel a sadness on me, Dane. That's how the Irish people say it. In their language, you can't say, "I am sad," or "I am happy". They understood what we English have long forgot. We're not our sadness. We're not our happiness or our pain but our language hypnotizes us and traps us in little labelled boxes. — Grant Morrison
There are dozens of unfinished or aborted projects in my files, but I can only assume they don't get done because they're not robust enough to struggle through the birth process. — Grant Morrison
When [Wonder Woman creator William Moulton] Marston died in 1947, they got rid of the pervy elements, and instantly sales plummeted. Wonder Woman should be the most sexually attractive, intelligent, potent woman you can imagine. Instead she became this weird cross between the Virgin Mary and Mary Tyler Moore that didn't even appeal to girls. — Grant Morrison
Modern man has successfully razed the imaginative landscapes of primal peoples the whole world over. Kill the gods first, slaughter the sacred animals, rewrite the mythologies, and build roads through the holy places. Do all this and watch the people decline. Without souls, they soon die, leaving dead shells, zombie cultures, shambling aimlessly towards oblivion. — Grant Morrison
Performing magic has a lot to do with the arrangement of apparent coincidences and providing pathways along which desires can travel, or, to put it in more basic terms, there's little point in sigilizing for a lottery win if you don't also buy a lottery ticket. — Grant Morrison
When was the last time you had a thought that wasn't put there by THEM? — Grant Morrison
Somewhere in our Darkest Nights we made up a story about a Man who will never let us down. — Grant Morrison
All it takes is one wrong turn. And there's always one wrong turn. — Grant Morrison
The Hoodmen are far from being the worst of the servants of the Cult of the Unwritten Book, but they are among the most peculiar. You know when you're trying to remember a word and it's on the tip of your tongue but you can't seem to get it out? Well, that's because the Hoodmen have eaten it. They eat all the words that are on the tips of other people's tongues. They thrive on misplaced words, savoring all the lost potential of each expression. They're also able to convert words into electricity. Mr. Steele took an entire phrase. — Grant Morrison
Life doesn't have plots and subplots and denouements. It's just a big collection of loose ends and dangling threads that never get explained. — Grant Morrison
We're the new power, come to replace the old. Cameras in the head, children with microchips, spin doctors rewriting reality as it happens. — Grant Morrison
I loved IRON MAN: Robert Downey Jr. has been and probably will be my favourite actor for a long time ... but IRON MAN, THE INCREDIBLE HULK, SUPERMAN RETURNS and all the others feel a little like Saturday morning cartoons next to the carbon black glory that is 'The Dark Knight.'
Trust me, *this* is the future of this sort of thing. — Grant Morrison
A cannon fires only once but words detonate across centuries — Grant Morrison
A thought robot activated by the tremendous energies unleashed during collisions of fundamental opposing qualities. A new fusion process powered by ... 'dualites'? No. There are no dualities. Only symmetries. Final Crisis: Superman Beyond — Grant Morrison
I do like to keep abreast of what the hardcore vocal members of the comics-reading audience are talking about on Internet message boards, but there are so few of them, as a percentage of the buying audience, that I can't allow their opinions to dictate story direction. — Grant Morrison
Doctor Doom was exactly the sort of bastard who would have armed al-Qaeda with death rays and killer robots if he thought for one second it would piss off the hated Reed Richards and the rest of his mortal enemies in the Fantastic Four, but here he was sobbing with the best of them, as representative not of evil, but of Marvel Comics' collective shock, struck dumb and moved to hand-drawn tears by the thought that anyone could hate America and its people enough to do this. — Grant Morrison
CYCLOPS: Emma ... I knew you wouldn't turn your back on us.
EMMA: Sweet as you are, I didn't come back for you Scott. I came for my handbag. Lucky for you, this is a Louis Vuitton. — Grant Morrison