Top 80 Warren Ellis Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Writing is basically a job for people who like punching themselves in the face, I’m pretty sure.”

— Warren Ellis

52. “Don’t live with writers. Writers are bastards.”

— Warren Ellis

53. “The quiet felt like a huge new country that he could wander around within for years without ever meeting its coastlines. A silence the size of the sky.”

— Warren Ellis

54. “In league with the fantastic. That’s a thought to keep hold of.”

— Warren Ellis

55. “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.”

— Warren Ellis

56. “Welcome to JG Ballard’s future, fast becoming a consensus of its own, wherein the future is intrinsically banal. It is, essentially, the sensible position to take right now.”

— Warren Ellis

57. “The absolute best thing anyone can do is grab desperately at the throttle. But they don’t. Because it’s a speeding death kaleidoscope made out of tits.” Adam.”

— Warren Ellis

58. “I know nothing about you except that I want to move through the world with you for as long as you’ll let me.”

— Warren Ellis

59. “How are we supposed to live in the future when the future just abandons us to the night?”

— Warren Ellis

60. “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

61. “Because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world.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

62. “No more circuses.”

— Warren Ellis

63. “Whenever I find myself somehow fooled into doing one of these talks, it’s on the grounds that some confused soul thinks that I will talk about the digital world and the future. What always happens is that I rant for an unspecified length of time about obscure history and fringe beliefs. So you need to understand that you are now trapped in this room with me and I’ve already been paid. This is my cunning plan.”

— Warren Ellis

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

— Warren Ellis

65. “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

66. “She outright murdered Clough with her eyes.”

— Warren Ellis

67. “Benighted infants,” Strauss laughed, gesturing at Goldmark to get the coffees. “I’d be amazed if anything in here grew on or near an animal. It’s all that printed meat, diddled with by needles.”

— Warren Ellis

68. “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

69. “Bugger this. I want a better world.”

— Warren Ellis

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

— Warren Ellis

71. “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

72. “Be exposed. Be open. Be who you want to be. It will never hurt as much as starving your own humanity of oxygen.”

— Warren Ellis

73. “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.”

— Warren Ellis

74. “Bloody Wolf Blitzer intoning that a weather bomb is going to detonate over America because the planet hates humans and time is a flat circle.”

— Warren Ellis

75. “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

76. “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

77. “There are no good futures. There’s nothing to head towards but more garish, unsustainable carnival acts.”

— Warren Ellis

78. “The near future? The future of anything is like some massive weather system on the horizon, pushing out thunderheads all over the place, and it’s impossible to predict where the lightning will strike. And in 2011 it’s worse than ever.”

— Warren Ellis

79. “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.”

— Warren Ellis

80. “Time was this place didn’t make sense and I could live with it. Either it’s changed, or I have.”

— Warren Ellis

81. “If contemporary literary fiction doesn’t read a bit like science fiction then it’s probably not all that contemporary, is it.”

— Warren Ellis

82. “God gave Moses the Ten Commandments: rules of behavior that were supposed to make people moral. Ten was too much to remember. Jesus knew this, He brought them down to two: Love God and Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself. Still too much to remember, if the last 2000 years is an indicator.”

— Warren Ellis

83. “Life is something very short that happens in between deaths.”

— Warren Ellis