Warren Ellis Quotations

Its a strange world. Lets keep it that way.

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

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

If you write any kind of fiction about America, you immediately have to start doing some research about guns, so in some ways, 'Gun Machine' is just the culmination of 20 years of reading about guns.

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

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.

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.

It's always difficult with the superhero stuff because you're working with characters who have been written by 100 to 200 people over the past 20 years, at least, so they never sound the same or act the same. The best approach is to try to draw the best fitting line through all of the interpretations.

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

On the evidence I have on hand at home, social media isn't killing our children. It isn't killing families, either, because the constant long bloody phone calls that parents complained to their teenagers about in decades past are gone.

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

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

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.

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.

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

For me, the Internet's like music. I don't like working without it. I will tune it out for hours at a time, as I get lost in the work, but I'd know if it wasn't there. If that makes sense.

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.

I am a messiah. Ask anyone on the Internet.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

In general, I don't like L.A. all that much, but it has wonderful parts.

Journalism is just a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that’s all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world.

Drinking is fun! It makes me feel horrible and sexy!

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

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.

What? I bring joy to the world. I am filled with mirth and sunlight. Also, I am Batman.

Dance like you're stamping on a human face forever, love like you've been in a serious car crash that minced the front of your brain, stab like no one can arrest you, and live like there's no such thing as God.

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.

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

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.

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

He was in blue jeans and a work shirt, which is another weird quirk of Rich Old Men. Just one of the guys here. Blue jeans and a work shirt, salt of the earth, working man like yourself. Like they're somehow uncomfortable about being rich enough to sleep in a bed made of vaginas being pulled around the town at night by a fleet of gold-covered midgets.

Magic is the cheat codes for the world.

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

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 --

If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it

good morning sinners. vampiric red bull intake in pub smoking compound commenced. day of heavy brain-fingering ahead.

Cheap! But not as cheap as your girlfriend.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Tradition:' one of those words conservative people use as a shortcut to thinking.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

I was having a mildly paranoid day, mostly due to the fact that the mad priest lady from over the river had taken to nailing weasels to my front door again.

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

What if I left my memory in the future and I have to catch up to it?

Don't live with writers. Writers are bastards.