Warren Ellis Quotes & Sayings

I wish I still had that photo. — Warren Ellis

That's what you should be worrying about. Idiots with all the money, plowing it into building a thing just because they can. — Warren Ellis

Read comics. All comics. And then cut them open to steal their power. — Warren Ellis

The best gifts are never given, but claimed. — Warren Ellis

This is the mainstream now, Mike. This is how life in America is. Moment by moment, our country has grown sicker. Our borders, Mike, have come to encompass the nine circles of Hell. — Warren Ellis

If it's accessible by hundreds of millions of people, then it's as mainstream as it gets. — Warren Ellis

constitute a horror story wherein the villains of the piece stole power from a stable governance system in order to cast the population of the world into an ongoing lab experiment with no plan or boundary. A dismal science. — Warren Ellis

Los Angeles had no culture of its own, just a large collection of misreadings of the artistic histories of other, proper cities. — Warren Ellis

I think one of the bigger lessons the Internet has taught us is that 'niche' or 'subculture' are a lot bigger than anyone ever thought. — Warren Ellis

By four o'clock, I've discounted suicide in favor of killing everyone else in the entire world instead. — Warren Ellis

Come on," said the Director. "You are all completely mad people who mess around with technology and weird social theory for fun until your brains shit themselves and you fall over. Any of you could have done this. — Warren Ellis

The City went to me in a LANDSLIDE, and you know why? Because all it wants is decent television, a bit of spare change for booze, and a blowjob every Saturday night. — Warren Ellis

I think blogging is a muscle that most people wear out. — Warren Ellis

Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, "if he could plot, we'd all have to get together and kill him." Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan's writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded. — Warren Ellis

You people don't know what the truth is! It's there, just under their bullshit, but you never look! That's what I hate most about this fucking city
LIES ARE NEWS AND TRUTH IS OBSOLETE! — Warren Ellis

There's one hole in every revolution, large or small. And it's one word long - PEOPLE. No matter how big the idea they all stand under, people are small and weak and cheap and frightened. It's people that kill every revolution. — Warren Ellis

Tallow was nervously aware that his name was on the worse cold-case dump CSU had ever seen. He was not looking forward to having them look at him and judge by eye exactly how much his organs might be worth on the black market. — Warren Ellis

My neck and shoulders are killing me. Hard to focus on writing about murder, doom, shagging, our hopeless future & other comedy etc etc. — Warren Ellis

I know nothing about you except that I want to move through the world with you for as long as you'll let me. — Warren Ellis

Ain't no Jesus in Snowtown, Detective. — Warren Ellis

Once in a very blue moon, John Tallow imagined his younger self standing down the timeline of his present life, bare toes curling in teenage beach sand, looking ahead to today and watching his future life collapse in on itself like a dying star. His future life becoming small and dark and dense, its gravity apparently grim and inescapable.
Once in a very blue moon, John Tallow spent some cash on a bottle of vodka and drank it at home within an hour. — Warren Ellis

The single simplest reason why human space flight is necessary is this, stated as plainly as possible: keeping all your breeding pairs in one place is a retarded way to run a species. — Warren Ellis

The near future? Pop will go down into the tube station at midnight and have sex. Lots of sex. And all those genres I listed earlier? Every single year will generate a list of new genres like that. Then every six months. Then every month. Then every week. Pop will fuck and mutate and survive. The new sounds will be everywhere, in too many places for us to notice them all at once. A million glorious bursts of incoherent noise. — Warren Ellis

You're at the age where the rush of the job has passed and the grind of the job is taken in stride, and this is the time when you're wondering if it wouldn't be so bad if you just stopped giving much of a shit and rolled along doing as little as possible. — Warren Ellis

Learning to write comics is, in fact, so bloody difficult because it's such a weird form that it does actually make you a bit more adaptable for other forms. — Warren Ellis

The absolute best thing anyone can do is grab desperately at the throttle. But they don't. Because it's a speeding death kaleidoscope made out of tits. Adam — Warren Ellis

He took it in for a moment. No internet. No phone service beyond the front desk. No television. No news. No information flow at all. Just a music collection and, somewhere, a library he evidently had to be medically fit to browse. It was quiet. It was actually quiet. He couldn't even hear other people. This little room was as close to sensory deprivation as he'd experienced since ... when? Childhood? — Warren Ellis

If you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain, do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set? — Warren Ellis

Fuck you . . . you fucking body-dysmorphia porn-addict trust-fund-baby compulsive-masturbation motherfucker. — Warren Ellis

And someone, somewhere, is saying What the fuck? Why not? — Warren Ellis

The untreated cardboard sleeve around the venti-plus cup, stamped with biodegradable inks, proclaiming the coffee shop's proud independence, the simple black printing on the flecked card making its own statement about authenticity. — Warren Ellis

Think about it; the quicktank is given a job most of us would laugh out of town. Build a sophisticated camera capable of full 3-D input and peripheral pickup, using only water and jelly.
Build an eye. — Warren Ellis

We hold up iPhones and, if we're relatively conscious of history, we point out that this is an amazing device that contains a live map of the world and the biggest libraries imaginable and that it's an absolute paradigm shift in personal communication and empowerment. And then some knob says that it looks like something from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and then someone else says that it doesn't even look as cool as Captain Kirk's communicator in the original and then someone else says no but you can buy a case for it to make it look like one and you're off to the manufactured normalcy races, where nobody wins because everyone goes to fucking sleep. — Warren Ellis

Scotch whisky is made from barley and the morning dew on angel's nipples. — Warren Ellis

Bat stood in the open door and said I am a crime scene unit detective from the New York City Police Department, you heinous fucking mongoloid, and there is nothing I cannot do. — Warren Ellis

I think the New Aesthetic is a series of observations. I think most of the trouble people have had with it comes from a misunderstanding of it as a movement. — Warren Ellis

The ECTs are moving the guns in small batches," Bat said. "We're making them take so many photos that one of them asked if she was being trained to shoot porno. — Warren Ellis

A Kenyan man once said to me, 'You can get used to anything when money's involved.' He used to stick mice up his ass for twenty bucks at a time. -Spider Jerusalem — Warren Ellis

Shopping for clothes is a Boyfriend Thing. You stand around and look blankly at a bunch of pieces of fabric and you look at the price tags and you wonder how something that'd barely cover your right nut can cost the price of a kidney and you watch the shop assistants check you out and wonder what you're doing with her because she's cute and you're kind of funny-looking and she tries clothes on and you look at her ass in a dozen different items that all look exactly the same and let's face it you're just looking at her ass anyway and it all blurs together and then someone sticks a vacuum cleaner in your wallet and vacuums out all the cash and you leave the store with one bag so small that mice couldn't fuck in it. Repeat a dozen times or until the front of your brain dies. — Warren Ellis

There would be internet, and books, and music. He could think, and be, and hold the world at a distance in order to see it properly. — Warren Ellis

The book is almost always better than the movie. You could have no better case in point than FROM HELL, Alan Moore's best graphic novel to date, brilliantly illustrated by Eddie Campbell. It's hard to describe just how much better the book is.
It's like, "If the movie was an episode of Battlestar Galactica with a guest appearance by the Smurfs and everyone spoke Dutch, the graphic novel is Citizen Kane with added sex scenes and music by your favourite ten bands and everyone in the world you ever hated dies at the end."
That's how much better it is. — Warren Ellis

I'd like to recover some of the strangeness and wonder of consideration of the future. — Warren Ellis

Time was this place didn't make sense and I could live with it. Either it's changed, or I have. — Warren Ellis

Ballardian banality comes from not getting the future that we were promised, or getting it too late to make the promised difference. — Warren Ellis

If Albert Einstein, the last century's very poster boy for the cunning man and the wild-haired magician of science, knew one thing, then it was simply that there was always more to be known. He didn't pridefully condemn dreams of physics and incomplete theories. He pointed off into the future and named the unknown things as, in fact, spooky action at a distance. — Warren Ellis

At the departure gate, a drunken airport security woman was handing out box cutters to the passengers. — Warren Ellis

That means that the universe is two-dimensional. Matter, energy, time, you, me and the floor are holograms. — Warren Ellis

She fixed him with a gaze that said that she had looked into the void and that she was really not impressed with it. — Warren Ellis

His quant band was gone, he noticed: he wouldn't be tracking his steps, his blood oxygen, heart rate, local EF field activity, or the five other things it automagically quantified and uploaded and shared. Digitally, he would actually appear dead. — Warren Ellis

I was originally going to train as a journalist, passing a series of exams that winnowed ten thousand applicants down to one hundred places on a National Union of Journalists course. — Warren Ellis

Where's the elevator?" Mike asked, sheathing his weapon. Tallow felt a little better telling Mike there wasn't an elevator and watching his face. But then Mike picked up the dolly, boxes and all, with one hand, took the kit bag from Sophie with the other, and started jogging up the stairs with"Third floor, right?"
"There," said Scarly, "goes a man who has names for all his muscles."
"I was just thinking that," Tallow said. "Serious gym rat."
"No, I mean he's named all his muscles. That's a man who calls one of his muscles Steve. — Warren Ellis

We may have been crazed, strange and entirely too eager to find new things to have sex with - but we went out to preserve great chunks of this planet's cultures and we damned well did it with some style — Warren Ellis

He is defining the immediate future as follows: old people huddling in big cities, afraid of the sky. — Warren Ellis

So this Zealot comes to my door, all glazed eyes and clean reproductive organs, asking me if I ever think about God. So I tell him I killed God. I tracked God down like a rabid dog, hacked off his legs with a hedge trimmer, raped him with a corncob, and boiled off his corpse in an acid bath. So he pulls an alternating-current taser on me and tells me that only the Official Serbian Church of Tesla can save my polyphase intrinsic electric field, known to non-engineers as "the soul." So I hit him. What would you do? — Warren Ellis

In the long run, you see, none of that matters.
I've seen Heaven, Dowling. And it's not a place where you exercise any power.
In the long run, we are all three-dimensional side-effects of a two-dimensional universe existing in a multidimensional stack. — Warren Ellis

Here's the thing about Apple technology: once you own a piece, you want to use it. — Warren Ellis

There are many good reasons for drinking, and one's just entered my head: If you don't drink when you're living, how the fuck can you drink when you're dead? — Warren Ellis

I stood there alone in the eerily silent streets of Las Vegas and listened to my penis cry. — Warren Ellis

I've always moved between media. Some ideas just work better in some media than others. — Warren Ellis

I grew up in the 80s in England: we'd wake up each morning and look out the window to see if the government had finally put Daleks on the streets. — Warren Ellis

Lots of cops married nurses, Tallow knew. Nurses understood the life: murderous shiftwork, long stretches of boredom, sudden adrenaline spikes, blood everywhere. Tallow almost smiled as he followed his wincing partner into the apartment building. He made sure the door closed as silently as possible, and only then did he draw his firearm. — Warren Ellis

- You know what this is?
- Nope
- It's a bowel disruptor. And you are just full of shit. — Warren Ellis

From his vantage, three steps back and to the right, Tallow could see Rosato's eye a good five inches outside Rosato's head and still attached to his eye socket by a mess of red worms. In that single second, Tallow abstractedly realized that in his last moment of life, James Rosato could see his killer from two different angles. — Warren Ellis

Santa Monica's only walkable if death is no hurdle. The air's the wrong colour. People put sunglasses on their dogs. It's a hideous place where humans are not welcome and those who stay suffer eight kinds of brain damage. — Warren Ellis

Straight people are so fucking weird. — Warren Ellis

No more circuses. — Warren Ellis

I try not to get involved in the business of prediction. It's a quick way to look like an idiot. — Warren Ellis

We are as gods on our little rock in the vast bleak cosmos and it's way past time we started getting good at that instead of just posing on Olympus and photoshopping our zits out. The future is more than an Instagram filter. — Warren Ellis

What Mogo did was to take ultimate action to improve his quality of life. This is at the root of murder. We kill people to make our own lives better. We kill them because they are obstacles to our desires, because they make us unhappy, because they burden us, or because they keep calling us fucking wizards. Murder increases happiness. — Warren Ellis

You think that drinking with a serial killer takes you into the midnight currents of the culture? I say bullshit. There's been twelve TV documentaries, three movies and eight books about me. I'm more popular than any of these designed-by-pedophile pop moppets littering the music television and the gossip columns. I've killed more people than Paris Hilton has desemenated, I was famous before she was here and I'll be famous after she's gone. I am the mainstream. I am, in fact, the only true rock star of the modern age. Every newspaper in America never fails to report on my comeback tours, and I get excellent reviews. — Warren Ellis

Ah, Hollywood. One day, you and I will play Operation. And I'll be the drunk, mad doctor with the hedge trimmer & you will wear the straps — Warren Ellis

When I got the tattoo, I knew I was drawing a crooked line between myself and society. — Warren Ellis

He was a futurist. They were all futurists. Everyone here gazed into the abyss for a living. Do it long enough, and the abyss would gaze back into you. If the abyss did that for long enough, the people who paid you for your eyes would send you to Normal Head. The — Warren Ellis

Wolves ate even mighty hunters, for there was no honor or code among predators, and everyone's guts steam the same way when torn open on a cold night. — Warren Ellis

The most basic mobile phone is in fact a communications devices that shames all of science fiction, all the wrist radios and handheld communicators. Captain Kirk had to tune his fucking communicator and it couldn't text or take a photo that he could stick a nice Polaroid filter on. Science fiction didn't see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn't see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make things amazing happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards. — Warren Ellis

Don't live with writers. Writers are bastards. — Warren Ellis

When I'm working in finite serials, I always think in terms of the entire book rather than the individual episode because, by far, the vaster sector of the project's lifespan will be in complete book form rather than the singles. — Warren Ellis

Prediction is the best circus act of all. But it is just an act. It's a carny turn. Stop doing it. — Warren Ellis

Fuck me", Bat gasped, "It's like an angel shat ice cream coffee rainbows in my mouth. — Warren Ellis

Writing comics? Still the best job in the world. I sit around all day making shit up and see it illustrated, in 99% of cases, exactly as I imagined it
if not better. I've been doing this a long time now, and I'm going to do it until I die. Which probably won't be long, given the constant insane deadline pressure. — Warren Ellis

It was like washing down a bucket of peyote with a vatful of absinthe. — Warren Ellis

Elijah Snow: 'Who have you pissed off this time, John?'
John Stone: 'Sumatran robot death sluts
Dammit, ONE of these buttons fires the atomic death biter
— Warren Ellis

You're miserable, edgy and tired. You're in the perfect mood for journalism. — Warren Ellis

ADDENDUM: SOMETIMES THE FUTURE IS BULLSHIT — Warren Ellis

He'd always liked women who'd talk back to him just a little bit. "Girls with balls" were good. Women with an actual mind of their own who could prove him wrong in something were, of course, castrating bitches who should be drowned in bottomless wells. — Warren Ellis

The oaks and firs stood up as they reached the interstate and pushed on through the South West Pacific Highway to the Salmon River Highway, past places with names like Falling Creek, Tualatin, Joe Dancer Park, and Erratic Rock. Places you could walk out into and die and never be found. He could imagine them seared by sun in summer and shrouded in snow in winter. Hammered by hail the size of coins in spring and autumn, pounding flesh and smashing bone, processed to be carried off chunk by speck in the guts of birds. — Warren Ellis

Aleister Crowley told a friend he could make any random fall over without touching them. To illustrate, he walked behind a stranger for a block or so, matching his footsteps precisely to the stranger's. He then scuffed his heels, as if stumbling and falling. And the stranger fell over. The stranger had heard himself fall, and so he fell. If Facebook tells you that everything around you is sad and depressing often enough, you get sad and depressed. All hail the Great Beast 666 of black marketing. — Warren Ellis

Science fiction is always about the time it's written in. 1984 was always about 1948. Science fiction is social fiction. I — Warren Ellis

It would take a human nine years to walk from the Earth to the moon. — Warren Ellis

Bloody Wolf Blitzer intoning that a weather bomb is going to detonate over America because the planet hates humans and time is a flat circle. — Warren Ellis

The joy of her smiles and laughs seemed, to Mister Sun, to be in her genuine surprise at their arrival, as if strong emotions traveled some miles to get here and showed up without warning. — Warren Ellis

I want something that'll give me the stamina of a young werewolf, the vision of a shaman, the thoughts of a serial killer and the gentleness of a hungry vampire bat. — Warren Ellis

The things I have sold to film, I've sold because I was happy to rent out the right to adapt those works. Some things, I haven't sold to film, because I was less interested in having no control over the adaptation. — Warren Ellis

I want vasopressin, washed caffeine, Jumpstart, ginkgo biloba, guarana, and any intelligence enhancer introduced in the last five years. — Warren Ellis

Post-modernism, which has probably lasted longer than modernism, is the process of interrogating the aesthetic discourse. Disrupting the narrative. Modernism says that things can be right. Post-modernism says that nothing can be right. So if you ever wonder why nothing new ever seems to happen any more, find a post-modernist and beat the shit out of then. Wyndham — Warren Ellis

Writing is basically a job for people who like punching themselves in the face, I'm pretty sure. — Warren Ellis

You wanted a more interesting world ... Maybe I'm growing up quickly. Maybe I'm better than you planned ... Maybe I'm just showing you that your world was interesting enough all the time, all on its own. And now I'm punishing you. — Warren Ellis

To be a futurist, in pursuit of improving reality, is not to have your face continually turned upstream, waiting for the future to come. To improve reality is to clearly see where you are, and then wonder how to make that better. — Warren Ellis

My grandfather had died, and my mother was trying to explain it to me ... Grandpa isn't coming back? No, she said. Not ever again ... And I remember saying, hold everything right fucking there. You went to all the trouble of conceiving me, and giving birth to me, and raising me and clothing me and all ... and you make me cry and things hurt so much and disappointments crush my heart every day and I can't do half the things I want to and sometimes I just want to scream
and what I've got to look forward to is my body breaking and something flipping off the switch in my head
I go through all this, and then there's death? What is the motherfucking deal here? I wasn't having this. This was not fair. — Warren Ellis

You want to know about voting. I'm here to tell you about voting. Imagine you're locked in a huge underground night-club filled with sinners, whores, freaks and unnameable things that rape pitbulls for fun. And you ain't allowed out until you all vote on what you're going to do tonight. You like to put your feet up and watch "Republican Party Reservation". They like to have sex with normal people using knives, guns, and brand new sexual organs you did not even know existed. So you vote for television, and everyone else, as far as your eye can see, votes to fuck you with switchblades. That's voting. You're welcome. — Warren Ellis