Warren Ellis Quotes

I think my printing to this day looks like the printing right out of a comic book. Actually, I always wanted to be in a comic book. I watched cartoons when I was a kid, too, and both comics and cartoons lit fire in my imagination. This realm holds a lot of interest for me, a lot of passion for me. So to be comic-ized, yeah, that's cool.

I've been exposed to a ton of 'Magneto' stories over the years, and they all influence me.

To see where I've stolen all my ideas from, look no further than the comics at your local comic shop!

I thought I had a great opportunity when I started doing my comic book in 1972. I thought there was so much territory to work in.

I've stolen licks from just about every person that ever picked up a guitar. We all borrow from one another; it's called legitimate stealing.

What adults don't always understand is that to a kid, a comic book is like a movie. My Marvel comics took my imagination to other places - other galaxies.

'Avengers' was a great comic-book movie. 'The Dark Knight Rises' is a great epic.

If you're a good composer, you steal good steals.

The best visual book I can think of is Lynda Barry's What It Is, but although I refer to it all the time it's not a creative writing book per se.

I'm usually the last to see my influence in other people's work. People give me stuff and say "Oh look, this guy's ripping you off," and I'm like "What do you mean?" Often I see the people that I've ripped off filtered into my own work. In other people's work, I can only see specific, tiny little instances of inflections stolen from another artist.

New arts are long in the world before poets describe them; for they borrow everything from their predecessors, and commonly derive very little from nature or from life.

I steal from every single movie ever made. I love it - if my work has anything it's that I'm taking this from this and that from that and mixing them together. If people don't like that, then tough titty, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal; they don't do homages.

I'm a black American playwright. I couldn't be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture; they're all cut out of the same cloth. That's who I am; that's who I write about.

It just sort of happened. I wrote like what I'd always read and what was in the movies... I'm sure popular music is supposed to be like this.

I'm a dreamer. I watch people. You don't try to become them because you could never become any of those guys. But you hope that some of it, you know, comes off on you at some point in your show, some point in your writing, that it happens to you and this light just shines on you.

In the right hands, a comic strip attains a beauty and elegance that, really, I would put against any other art.

I do like comic book movies, but only the ones that I read as a kid.

The quality of our lives is diminished every time we lose a great artist.

[The writer] must essentially draw from life as he sees it, lives it, overhears it or steals it, and the truer the writer, perhaps the bigger the blackguard. He lives by biting the hand that feeds him.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

I enjoy the art, and I enjoy drawing. I think my printing to this day looks like the printing right out of a comic book.

A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.

Abstraction didn't have to be limited to a kind of rectilinear geometry or even a simple curve geometry. It could have a geometry that had a narrative impact. In other words, you could tell a story with the shapes. It wouldn't be a literal story, but the shapes and the interaction of the shapes and colors would give you a narrative sense. You could have a sense of an abstract piece flowing along and being part of an action or activity. That sort of turned me on.

Jordie Bellaire knows how to tell a story with color.

The function of the artist is to make people like life better than they have before.