Top 80 Warren Ellis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Its a strange world. Lets keep it that way.”

— Warren Ellis

2. “You’re miserable, edgy and tired. You’re in the perfect mood for journalism.”

— Warren Ellis

3. “Scotch whisky is made from barley and the morning dew on angel’s nipples.”

— Warren Ellis

4. “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

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

— Warren Ellis

6. “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

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

— Warren Ellis

8. “Tradition:? one of those words conservative people use as a shortcut to thinking.”

— Warren Ellis

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

— Warren Ellis

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

— Warren Ellis

11. “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

12. “Listen to the Chair Leg of Truth! It does not lie!”

— Warren Ellis

13. “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

14. “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.”

— Warren Ellis

15. “Magic is the cheat codes for the world.”

— Warren Ellis

16. “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

17. “Prediction is the best circus act of all. But it is just an act. It’s a carny turn. Stop doing it.”

— Warren Ellis

18. “The best gifts are never given, but claimed.”

— Warren Ellis

19. “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.”

— Warren Ellis

20. “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

21. “I can’t solve any problems. All I can do is try to make sure people can’t avoid noticing them.”

— Warren Ellis

22. “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

23. “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

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

— Warren Ellis

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “All people are scum. No matter what they look like.”

— Warren Ellis

29. “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

30. “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

31. “Cheap! But not as cheap as your girlfriend.”

— Warren Ellis

32. “Magic is the cheat codes for the world. Sending a signal to reality’s operating system, see?”

— Warren Ellis

33. “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

34. “Drinking is fun! It makes me feel horrible and sexy!”

— Warren Ellis

35. “You never get tired of looking at the stars.”

— Warren Ellis

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

— Warren Ellis

37. “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.”

— Warren Ellis

38. “Yeah, trust the fuckhead.”

— Warren Ellis

39. “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.”

— Warren Ellis

40. “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

41. “We only wanted jetpacks because we couldn’t make magic carpets work.”

— Warren Ellis

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

— Warren Ellis

43. “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

44. “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

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

— Warren Ellis

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

— Warren Ellis

47. “She fixed him with a gaze that said that she had looked into the void and that she was really not impressed with it.”

— Warren Ellis

48. “Aleister Crowley told a friend he could make any random fall over without touching them. To illustrate, he walked behind a stranger for a block or so, matching his footsteps precisely to the stranger’s. He then scuffed his heels, as if stumbling and falling. And the stranger fell over. The stranger had heard himself fall, and so he fell. If Facebook tells you that everything around you is sad and depressing often enough, you get sad and depressed. All hail the Great Beast 666 of black marketing.”

— Warren Ellis

49. “The joy of her smiles and laughs seemed, to Mister Sun, to be in her genuine surprise at their arrival, as if strong emotions traveled some miles to get here and showed up without warning.”

— Warren Ellis

50. “Ballardian banality comes from not getting the future that we were promised, or getting it too late to make the promised difference.”

— Warren Ellis