Grant Morrison Quotes

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.

I guess my inspiration is this - I like to pretend that every story that ever happened to 'Batman' was real and is part of this one guy's life.

Sometimes it's only madness that makes us what we are.

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.

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.

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.

All it takes is one wrong turn. And there's always one wrong turn.

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.

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

The 'medium' is unaware of its attractiveness, that's all. Everyone loves comics. I've proven this to my own satisfaction by handing them out to acountants, insurance brokers, hairdressers, mothers of children, black belts, pop stars, taxi drivers, painters, lesbians, doctors etc. etc. The X-Files, Buffy, the Matrix, X-Men - mainstream culture is not what it once was when science fiction and comics fans huddled in cellars like Gnostic Christians dodging the Romans. We should come up into the light soon before we suffocate.

You have given them an ideal to aspire to, embodied their highest aspirations.
They will race, and stumble, and fall and crawl ... and curse ... and finally ...
They will join you in the sun, Kal-El.
They will stumble, they will fall.
But in time, they will join you in the sun.
In time you will help them accomplish wonders.

Your pleasures lessen in intensity the more the are repeated. Yet your capacity to experience ever more agony--is inexhaustible.

Whatever you do, make sure you go right to the top, because you sure as hell can't piss upwards on people.

Truth speaks best in the language of poetry and symbolism, I think.

Because it all derived from Superman. I mean, I love all the characters, but Superman is just this perfect human pop-culture distillation of a really basic idea. He's a good guy. He loves us. He will not stop in defending us. How beautiful is that? He's like a sci-fi Jesus. He'll never let you down. And only in fiction can that guy actually exist, because real guys will always let you down one way or another. We actually made up an idea that beautiful. That's just cool to me. We made a little paper universe where all of the above is true.

No matter how shitty things are, you can always get a song out of it.

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.

I didn't quit drinking. I stopped drinking shitty alcohol with assholes. And that, my friend, was the healthiest choice I've ever made.

Oh, yes! Fill the churches with dirty thoughts! Introduce honesty to the White House! Write letters in dead languages to people you've never met! Paint filthy words on the foreheads of children! Burn your credit cards and wear high heels! Asylum doors stand open! Fill the suburbs with murder and rape! Divine madness! Let there be ecstasy, ecstasy in the streets! Laugh and the world laughs with you!

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history.

I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad,
which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list.

But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius nov

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.

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.

If our shallow, self-critical culture sometimes seems to lack a sense of the numinous or spiritual it's only in the same way a fish lacks a sense of the ocean.

Enjoy yourself out there... in the asylum.

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.

All is one in Darkseid. The mighty body is my church. When I command your surrender, I speak with three billion voices ...

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.

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

The first light had cast the first shadow.

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.

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

Reality and unreality have no clear distinction in our present circumstances.

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.

Sometimes you wonder, in an interconnected universe, who's dreaming who?

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.

I just wanted all the wars to be over so that we could spend the money on starships and Mars colonies.

Self-awareness: there is the black worm in the apple. Our curse is to know there's something terribly wrong with us.

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.

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.

I love 'Batman.' I love the Adam West 'Batman.' I love the animated 'Batman.' The character of Batman can encompass any interpretation, which is what makes that character so brilliant and why it's survived so many different media.

Sometimes I pretend not to look at my own characters, because that's like different people getting off with your girlfriend or something.

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.

Of course I'm a threat. Why? Did you think for a moment that I wasn't? - Emma Frost

I plan years in advance, but I like to leave enough space in the narrative scheme to change things, because I always get my best ideas the closer I come to the end of a project, after I've lived with it for a while.

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.

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.

When was the last time you had a thought that wasn't put there by THEM?

He can survive anywhere. Anytime. Surviving is what he does.

It's salt. Why don't you sprinkle some on me, honey? Aren't I just good enough to eat?

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?

Words are ugly when they travel in packs.

Only nothing is impossible.

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.

The multiverse has natural defenses none of you could have imagined. No one %$%$ with the judge of all evil.

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.

This is the end of our sentence

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.

I tend to only read comics written by friends or people I've known. And I'm not a great comic reader.

Unlike novel characters, comic book characters last an eternity. When a character is changed beyond recognition, there's no longer the merchandising aspect.

Metaphor is one of a group of problem-solving medicines known as figures of speech which are normally used to treat literal thinking and other diseases.

I have to confess I'm not a huge comics fan in the wider sense of comics as an art form.

I really think this is it...
Third time lucky.
This is the one...
...this is going to change everything.

From now on, I'm opting for ontological terrorism.

X-Men is not a story about superheroes, but a story about the ongoing revolutionary struggle between good/new and bad/old. The X-Men are every rebel teenager wanting to change the world and make it better. Humanity is every adult, clinging to the past, trying to destroy the future even as he places all his hopes there.

Study yourself the way a hunter studied prey. Exploit your own weaknesses to create desired changes within yourself.

And I ask him why he cuts his arms with a razor. Just fo feel. Just to feel something.

Adults ... struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real.

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.

These characters were like twelve-bar blues or other chord progressions. Given the basic parameters of Batman, different creators could play very different music.

Don't patronize me or I'll break your face - Damian Wayne (Prime Earth)

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.

I will rise from the darkness, shining like the morning star.
Illuminated woman am I.

All I know is that you won't come back until they're all dead. 'Eternity.' Every last one of them. Every man. Every woman. Every child. Global massacre. I dream about that day. A planet of corpses

In the world of the superheroes, everything had value, potential, mystery. Any person, thing, or object could be drafted into service in the struggle against darkness and evil - remade as a weapon or a warrior or a superhero. Even a little bee named Michael - after God's own avenging angel - could pitch in to win the battle against wickedness.

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.

Hell changes constantly but there are certain consistent landmarks which always stay in the same relation to one another.

I think that superhero comics in particular are really useful for talking about big emotions and feelings, and personifying and concretizing symbols.

I couldn't think of one clever way to stop this guy, so I just trusted to mindless violence.

Kipling: Where's your sense of humor?
Rebis: We're working on reconstructing it ...

Afraid? Batman's not afraid of anything. It's me. I'm afraid. I'm afraid that The Joker may be right about me. Sometimes ... I question the rationality of my actions. And I'm afraid that when I walk through those asylum gates ... when I walk into Arkham and the doors close behind me ... it'll be just like coming home.

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.

Imagine the earth's population of six billion people reduced to just one hundred representatives. Statistically, that makes 30 white, 70 non-white. It means 6 people own 59% of the wealth and they all live in North America. 80 are in substandard housing. One has an education. One owns a computer. Don't blame me if it all sounds crazy.

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.

We live in the stories we tell ourselves.

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.

I won't tell you again! Don't look back! In hell you never look back!

A cannon fires only once but words detonate across centuries

Our stupidity has turned the world into a hand grenade. Our greed has pulled the pin.

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.

Before it was a Bomb, the Bomb was an Idea. Superman, however, was a Faster, Stronger, Better Idea.

Idealists and reformers all become executioners in their turn. The road to utopia ends with the steps of the scaffold, the endless moment of the guillotine.

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.

Routine is important, i think.a good routine diverts the mind from morbid imaginings.

Madness is born in the blood. It is my birthright.

[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.

Stop being frightened. You only see a monster because they want you to see monsters everywhere. They've conditioned you to look for monsters in every shadow, every coat hung on every door. As long as we keep seeing monsters, we'll continue to need protection and that's how other people get to control our lives.

Who needs girls when you've got comics?

Hell is only the Cringe Eternal and the Place of our Self's Undoing. When Nietzsche proclaimed "God is Dead!" he forgot to add that Satan is also dead and we are free from all that antique tat.

There's a palace in your head, boy. Learn to live in it always.

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.