Warren Ellis Interview Quotes

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. ~ Grant Morrison

Small things bring joy, somedays. ~ Warren Ellis

Half the time he seems autistic, the rest of the time he's like a lizard jacked full of lithium and speed. These things do not promote love in most of us. ~ Warren Ellis

I am a messiah. Ask anyone on the Internet. ~ Warren Ellis

IT TOOK a conscious effort for Tallow to keep his hand off his gun as he walked up the apartment building's stairs. There was no threat here. He told himself that with every step. But every step held memory. ~ 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

Who the hell is Warren Ellis again?"
Hardison gaped at the man. "Only one of the greatest comics writers in the past twenty years. Might as well ask who Alan Moore is, or Frank Miller, or Mark Waid, or Brian Michael Bendis, or Marv Wolfman, or Geoff Johns."

Eliot gave Hardison a blank look as they wove their way through the hall. Parker took the lead, toting a printed sign with her. Eliot and Hardison trailed in her wake. They made a point of striding right past Patronus's booth. They didn't turn to see if he noticed them.

"No one?" Hardison said. "Nothing? Not even Kurt Busiek? Neil Gaiman?"

"I have a life. I do things, active things. I date women."
"Stan Lee?"

Eliot gave Hardison that one with a wag of his head. "Who hasn't heard of Stan Lee?"

"All right," Hardison said with satisfaction. "You had me worried there, man. ~ Matt Forbeck

It's been so long, i'm afraid to get laid now! I got so much internal pressure built up that i'd probably blow a hole in a woman the size of my fist! ~ 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 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

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

Be authentic to your dreams. Be authentic to your own idea about yourself. Grind away at your own minds and bodies until you become your own invention. Be Mad Scientists. ~ Warren Ellis

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. ~ Warren Ellis

I remember first learning about death quite vividly.

I'm not sure how old I was, but I remember the conversation like it was yesterday. My grandfather had died, and my mother was trying to explain it to me.

'Sometimes, when someone gets ill, and they're very very old, they don't get better again. They just get iller and iller and then... then their body stops working.'

'I don't understand.'

'What's in them just goes away, and doesn't come back.'

'Grandpa isn't coming back?'

'No,' she said. 'Not ever again.'

'Grandpa said he was going away and not ever coming back after he held Grandma's head in that cotton-dump outside of town and kicked Skeeter seventy-three times.'

'Grandpa was very drunk. That's not the same as being dead. Grandpa's dead, son. He's not there anymore.'

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 feeding me and clothing me and all-- and, YEAH, whipping me from time to time, and making me live in a house that's freezing fucking cold all the goddamn time-- 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 do 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 ~ Warren Ellis

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

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

Do you want to eat Peyotl and human flesh on the path to spiritual enlightenment? Or just for the hell of it? Join the ancient cult of Anasazi. ~ Warren Ellis

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

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 ... ? ~ Warren Ellis

Predicting causes litter. ~ Warren Ellis

Mister Sun wondered if he really believed it was true that the heart is just a pump. ~ Warren Ellis

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. ~ 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

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. ~ Warren Ellis

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. ~ 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

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

Magic is the cheat codes for the world. ~ 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

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

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. ~ Warren Ellis

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. ~ Warren Ellis

Yeah, trust the fuckhead. ~ 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

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

I have met people who insist that humans taste like veal. And one woman from Canada who will swear up and down that people, like most other things, taste a bit like chicken. But she was crazy. And also Canadian. ~ Warren Ellis

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

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

I live on my phone: I have a bunch of news and informational apps on there. ~ Warren Ellis

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 ~ Warren Ellis

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