Warren Ellis Quotes

In league with the fantastic. That's a thought to keep hold of.

You must remember that the common criminal will always join the armed forces for, if nothing else, regular meals and expert training in the use of guns.

Tallow walked into Bat and Scarly's office to find Bat slumped on a chair with his head on the workbench, turned away from the door, while Scarly softly sharpened on old straight razor on a worn strop, watching her partner intently.
"I don't think he needs his eyebrows, do you? I mean, they don't serve an immediate function or anything," she whispered.

I'm clearly insane. I'm threatening your life with a toothbrush,

I admit that I have sometimes claimed to be Batman in the past. But only when really, really drunk.

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.

None of it seemed real. He laughed at Mount Hood, capped with silvered white in the middle of summer. Who paints a frosted mountaintop into a summer scene? What a ridiculous failure of reality.

He stopped laughing when he remembered it was a failure of reality that put him in this car in the first place, and was quiet for a long time.

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

ON PLAYING back the 911 recording, it'd seem that Mrs. Stegman was more concerned that the man outside her apartment door was naked than that he had a big shotgun.

I try to read a Kindle Single a week, but I'm getting bad at that. I usually have a few books on the go.

The near future? The future of anything is like some massive weather system on the horizon, pushing out thunderheads all over the place, and it's impossible to predict where the lightning will strike. And in 2011 it's worse than ever.

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?

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.

Really?" Mister Sun said. "You killed a man with the same knife you use to make brunch, and you're suddenly squeamish about a hammer.

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.

An expression crept over Asher's face that was not unlike that of a lonely child being told that Santa had not in fact been strangled to death in an alley in New Orleans

He tried to close a hand around the precious coffee but had to jerk his fingers away, sharply enough that his wrist popped painfully. Tallow wondered if the other end of the coffee machine was slurping water out of a lake in Hell.

I want a tattoo over my heart that reads TRY HARDER YOU LAZY PARAMEDIC SHITBAG OR I WILL HAUNT YOUR BEDROOM FOREVER

Ain't no Jesus in Snowtown, Detective.

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

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.

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

Our guy has a property office, John. And I don't mean the Property Office here in One PP. I mean the huge fucking storage facility. A guy in there, with access to thousands of fucking handguns. Even the ones that other people would be keeping an eye on, like Son of Sam's piece, for fuck's sake - a guy in there who'll just boost them and give them to our guy to kill people with. And if the guns are too famous, he'll cut his own slugs out of the bodies and walk away. This guy, our guy, he's actually starting to scare me a bit right now."
"A couple of hundred kills to his name didn't do that?"
"Meh. I dream about killing two hundred people every fucking night."
"You know," said Tallow, "whenever I'm in danger of forgetting you're CSU, you always find a way to remind me.

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

Magic is the cheat codes for the world.

How are we supposed to live in the future when the future just abandons us to the night?

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

Take gets beamed back to our servers and skimmed by an algorithm reader, which is a piece of software that's maybe as smart as a puppy. It sits up and barks when something really unusual happens in its field of vision.

Of course I don't care if you're bleeding! I'm fucking autistic!

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

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

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?

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.

The future arrived here a couple of weeks ago and nobody noticed. Because that's how the future always arrives. You don't realize it's here until you bump into it.

ADDENDUM: SOMETIMES THE FUTURE IS BULLSHIT

It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way.

Stephen King says that if you forget an idea, then it can't have been any good. He means he, not you. You are not Stephen King. Do not attempt to emulate Stephen King at home.

There ain't enough happens in soccer. It's like watching twenty-two hair models kick a ball around for what seems like six months and then one of them falls over and the ball goes in the goal.

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.

The lesson of 'CSI' is: No matter what horrible things happen, nice policemen will turn up and fix everything and return it to the status quo.

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.

Yesterday, here in the middle of the City, I saw a wolf turn into a Russian ex-gymnast and hand over a business card that read YOUR OWN PERSONAL TRANSHUMAN SECURITY WHORE! STERILIZED INNARDS! ACCEPTS ALL CREDIT CARDS to a large man who had trained attack cancers on his face and possessed seventy-five indentured Komodo Dragons instead of legs. And they had sex. Right in front of me. And six of the Komodo Dragons spat napalm on my new shoes.

Small things bring joy, somedays.

TRUTH comes easier when you're nine years old, too. Everything's a lot less complicated. This or that. Us or them. Truth or lie.

The future sneaks up on us. It leaks in through the small, ordinary things.

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.

Why do I even have to say this? Why do I have to say "Get off the unique and probably alien living plinth that zaps the unwary?" What is wrong with my life that I have to say these things out loud ... ?

The two guys who ran the place, always in Williamsburg hipster uniforms of short-sleeved shirts and neatly trimmed beards that looked stuck on with spirit gum, paid, as ever, no attention to anything but the food and the money. Tallow imagined that every night they counted their money and prided themselves on having not made eye contact with anything human.

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

You're probably wondering why there's never any good news.
I mean, I've been doing this job a few months now. I've been soaking up the paper every week, same as you, and watching the same newsfeeds as you. I got the same list burned into the front of my head as you. Death. Horror. Bad sex. Living nightmares. Each day a little further down the spiral.
There's never any good news because they know you.
I mean, here's the top of today's column that I discarded: I had a really good time last night down the bar with my assistant and some cheerfully doomed sex fiends of our acquaintance.
No one ever sold newspapers by telling you the truth; life just ain't that bad.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

You know what it's like, finding eight middle-aged guys having tantric sex with ostriches?

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.

Bukkake," said a voice in my ear. "Multiple ejaculations onto the face. It's the new thing." It was the tattooed girl, crouched behind my chair. "This is the only genuine and authentic Godzilla Bukkake night in America.

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.

These things are going to look primitive to you, but you have to remember that we're not stupid. We have the same intelligence as you. We simply don't have the same cumulative knowledge you do. So we apply our intelligence to what we have.

Writer's block? I've heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write, yes? Then that person isn't a writer anymore. I'm sorry, but the job is getting up in the fucking morning and writing for a living.

There was so much silence. The quiet felt like a huge new country that he could wander around inside for years without ever meeting its coastlines. A silence the size of the sky.

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

Being a nun wasn't all it was cracked up to be and the sex was shit.

She's really married?" Tallow said to Bat.
"Yeah. Talia's like this Scandinavian Amazon who can break rocks with her boobs. She could fit Scarly in her armpit. Sometimes I think she likes Scarly just because she was the most portable lesbian available.

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

Rough week, right?

Listen, every book in your home is one of us saying to you, please hold on until the end. We want you to stay with us so we can all see, together, how it all turns out. You're not alone. One of us is with you all the time. Hold on tight. See you next week.

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.

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.

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

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

You don't learn journalism in school, you learn it by WRITING FUCKING JOURNALISM. You teach yourself to wire up your own brain and gut and reproductive organs into one frightening machine that you aim at the planet like a meat gun.

Listen, when some asshole pulls a gun on me, he loses his right to a warm milky drink and fucking cuddles, okay?

Tallow turned the corner into Bat and Scarly's office to be greeted by a large plastic robot on the bench waving its arms and shouting, "Say hello to my l'il frien'" in an electronically processed voiced as a small plastic penis repeatedly jabbed out from its groin on a short metal piston.
Bat emerged from behind the thing. "Don't judge me," he said. "I got bored.

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

I am a messiah. Ask anyone on the Internet.

I'm going to shit in your lungs for this.

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

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.

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.

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

There are people out there so heavily specialized in wearable technology that they call shirts with networked devices built into them "wearable shirts." They're so deep into their own silo of futurism that they've forgotten how shirts work.

Yeah, trust the fuckhead.

Flows of shit» , muttered Bat, «I'd go insane, listening to that all day. It's just a river of 'Hey, this crazy, disgusting thing just happened, and hey, here's another one, and another, and another, has your brain caught fire yet?' It's like disaster porn or something.

Unless you turn out to be a shining and ballistic genius, then, trust me, if you want to do this then you're going to be spending the next few years doing little else. This is a thing you do at a table with a notebook and a keyboard, and there's no getting away from it. Put in the hours. You don't get to turn off 'being a writer.'

The two most dangerous things in the world are rich people and crazy people. The Roanokes are rich like pharoahs and crazier'n a snake-fucking baby.

There was a time when I liked a good riot. Put on some heavy old street clothes that could stand a bit of sidewalk-scraping, infect myself with something good and contagious, then go out and stamp on some cops. It was great, being nine years old.

Jim Rosato was recently married, to a Greek nurse. Rosato was half Irish and half Italian, and there was a pool on at the 1st as to which of the two would arrive at work wearing the other's skin as a hat within the year.

I can't solve any problems. All I can do is try to make sure people can't avoid noticing them.

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.

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.

An environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world. The present is always invisible because it's environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone is alive in an earlier day.

Comics is still my first love. But I always did other kinds of writing, too, so I think of myself as a writer first.

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

Predicting causes litter.

But I am not a monster because I kill. Killing is easy. I am a monster because I accept the hard choices. (Frank Moses)

You never get tired of looking at the stars

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.

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.