Warren Ellis Quotes

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

It would take a human nine years to walk from the Earth to the moon. ~ 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 just did an arc with Warren Ellis - and no one else on the planet could get away with this, because I think this is like harassment? - But Warren felt like there was a depiction of Spider-Woman where it looked like her waist perhaps didn't contain any internal organs. And he suggested very quietly ... 'You should fix that, or else I will come to your house and nail your feet to the floor and set your house on fire.' ... And it totally got fixed! ~ Kelly Sue DeConnick

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. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I partnered you with Jim all those years ago because you were complimentary kinds of crazy. You kept each other in check. I need you to not crawl back inside your own skull and watch the world with binoculars from deep cover. ~ Warren Ellis

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. ~ Warren Ellis

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

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. ~ 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

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

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. ~ Warren Ellis

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. ~ 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

You never get tired of looking at the stars ~ 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 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 admit that I have sometimes claimed to be Batman in the past. But only when really, really drunk. ~ 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

Look at a Segway and tell me it's not the world's shittiest witch's broomstick. We only wanted jetpacks because we couldn't make magic carpets work. ~ Warren Ellis

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. ~ 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

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

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

Psalm 111:10. The fear of God. The awe and dread of all that spooky action at a distance. And the Devil was understood to be less an adversary than a particularly evil employee of God. He was that bastard in the Human Resources Department who looks for ways to screw with your life. Satan was real. And he wandered around each day with an eye out for opportunities to tempt ordinary people into sinning. And God allowed it. There was presumably a housing crisis in Heaven or something, and he let Satan roam the earth, tricking people out of their renting privileges in the afterlife. ~ 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

Small things bring joy, somedays. ~ Warren Ellis

All the time, I was telling myself, just enjoy it for what it is, don't be weird, don't get all screwed up over something it isn't. The usual mantra when you're with someone who you're not really with and desperately want to be.
Have you noticed how telling yourself all that shit never actually helps? ~ 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

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. ~ Warren Ellis

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

I wish I still had that photo. ~ 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

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

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

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. ~ Warren Ellis

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. ~ Warren Ellis

Drinking is fun! It makes me feel horrible and sexy! ~ Warren Ellis

Just about everything put out by Top Shelf and Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics is what I keep up with. And once in a while, I'll read the more mainstream comics - I like Grant Morrison's writing and some of Warren Ellis' stuff, although maybe they're more on the fringe of the mainstream. ~ Jeffrey Brown

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

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

People. You're not crazy if there really are robot insects listening to every word you say."

Someone said, "I fucking told you ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Warren Ellis

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. ~ Warren Ellis

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

Predicting causes litter. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The future is a product, and you only get to vote with your money now, ~ 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

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

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

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

I can be collaborative, for instance, in situations where I go and study the artist's work before I start writing. Then I can at least try to write towards their style. ~ 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

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

ADDENDUM: SOMETIMES THE FUTURE IS BULLSHIT ~ Warren Ellis

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

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

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. ~ Warren Ellis

I've died before. It was boring, so I stood up. ~ 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

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. ~ 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

Listen to the Chair Leg of Truth! It does not lie! ~ Warren Ellis

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

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. ~ Warren Ellis

In his other hand is a spear made from duct tape, a smashed Nokia phone from 1998 and a selfie stick. Welcome to the future. ~ Warren Ellis

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

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

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. ~ Warren Ellis

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