45 Quotes & Sayings By Warren Ellis

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. Warren Ellis

Did you ever want to set someone's head on fire, just to see what it looked like? Did you ever stand in the street and think to yourself, I could make that nun go blind just by giving her a kiss? Did you ever lay out plans for stitching babies and stray cats into a Perfect New Human? Did you ever stand naked surrounded by people who want your gleaming sperm, squirting frankincense, soma and testosterone from every pore? If so, then you're the bastard who stole my drugs Friday night. And I'll find you. Oh, yes. 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

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

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

Writing comics? Still the best job in the world. I sit around all day making shit up and see it illustrated, in 99% of cases, exactly as I imagined it -- if not better. I've been doing this a long time now, and I'm going to do it until I die. Which probably won't be long, given the constant insane deadline pressure. Warren Ellis

Religion lives not in dogma, but utterly within the virtues of love and self-sacrifice. Without those, there is no future I can bear to stand, nor hope for the continuance of God's creation. It is not blasphemy to say that the work of Jesus the redeemer was and is to break the chains of the realms of darkness. And set free the creature from the power of sin. Warren Ellis

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. 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

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

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

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

That was a stupid idea I made up while drunk. Why did someone build that? Warren Ellis

Yeah, trust the fuckhead. Warren Ellis

The best gifts are never given, but claimed. 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

Love is very important, nurse Igor. Love is a gateway emotion. Without it, you cannot fully comprehend and experience things like.. vengeance, for instance. Or terror. Loss. Hate. Hate is all you need. Hate means never having to say you're sorry. You can't hate properly without ever having been in love. Because nothing will teach you hate as well as being in love. You can't understand a place without loving it. And it's the act of loving it that teaches you to hate it, as it chips away at your heart with its daily failures and disappointments. . Warren Ellis

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

The elevator doors opened to reveal a very large man brandishing a bloodstained antique phone receiver in a plastic bag and proclaiming, "I found this up him! "" You know, " said Tallow, "I really have no response to that. 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

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

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

You people don't know what the truth is! It's there, just under the bullshit, but you never look! That's what I hate most about this fucking city-- Lies are news and truth is obsolete! 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

You think that drinking with a serial killer takes you into the midnight currents of the culture? I say bullshit. There's been twelve TV documentaries, three movies and eight books about me. I'm more popular than any of these designed-by-pedophile pop moppets littering the music television and the gossip columns. I've killed more people than Paris Hilton has desemenated, I was famous before she was here and I'll be famous after she's gone. I am the mainstream. I am, in fact, the only true rock star of the modern age. Every newspaper in America never fails to report on my comeback tours, and I get excellent reviews. . Warren Ellis

You never get tired of looking at the stars Warren Ellis

I was happiest when I was working for myself. Setting my own goals. Improving my own skills… Take control of your world. 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 can't solve any problems. All I can do is try to make sure people can't avoid noticing them. 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

You want to go out to dinner sometime? Sorry, no. I'm married, not hungry, infected with seven unknown diseases, gay, pregnant with lizards and clinically dead. Warren Ellis

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

At the departure gate, a drunken airport security woman was handing out box cutters to the passengers. 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