Grant Morrison

“Sometimes... sometimes I think the Asylum is a head. We're inside a huge head that dreams us all into being. Perhaps it's your head, Batman. Arkham is a looking glass... and we are you.”

“The moon is so beautiful. It's a big silver dollar, flipped by God. And it landed scarred side up, see? So He made the world.”

“And I ask him why he cuts his arms with a razor. "Just fo feel. Just to feel something.”

“Afraid? Batman's not afraid of anything. It's me. I'm afraid. I'm afraid that The Joker may be right about me. Sometimes…I question the rationality of my actions. And I’m afraid that when I walk through those asylum gates... when I walk into Arkham and the doors close behind me... it’ll be just like coming home.”

“Sometimes I feel like I'm writing pornography in the notebook of the gods.”

“[He]... watches the Joker rising from his wheelchair, the way a rabbit watches car headlights bearing down, unable to move a single, spotlit muscle. The madman's limbs appear to unlatch as though some psychotic god has chosen to give life to a complicated Swiss Army knife. The Joker's head rotates... the green lasers of his eyes target the keys at the big man's belt, and he shakes his head.”

“All is one in Darkseid. The mighty body is my church. When I command your surrender, I speak with three billion voices...”

“Then I reminded myself that all intelligent children suffer bad dreams.”

“These characters were like twelve-bar blues or other chord progressions. Given the basic parameters of Batman, different creators could play very different music.”

“Routine is important, I think. A good routine diverts the mind from morbid imaginings.”

“Einstein was wrong! I'M the speed of light CRACKING through shivery rainbows and GOD the sky whirls and withers like a melting RAINBOW!”

“The 'medium' is unaware of its attractiveness, that's all. Everyone loves comics. I've proven this to my own satisfaction by handing them out to acountants, insurance brokers, hairdressers, mothers of children, black belts, pop stars, taxi drivers, painters, lesbians, doctors etc. etc. The X-Files, Buffy, the Matrix, X-Men - mainstream culture is not what it once was when science fiction and comics fans huddled in cellars like Gnostic Christians dodging the Romans. We should come up into the light soon before we suffocate.”

“All the comics are sigils. "Sigil" as a word is out of date. All this magic stuff needs new terminology because it's not what people are being told it is at all. It's not all this wearying symbolic misdirection that's being dragged up from the Victorian Age, when no-one was allowed to talk plainly and everything was in coy poetic code. The world's at a crisis point and it's time to stop bullshitting around with Qabalah and Thelema and Chaos and Information and all the rest of the metaphoric smoke and mirrors designed to make the rubes think magicians are 'special' people with special powers. It's not like that. Everyone does magic all the time in different ways. "Life" plus "significance" = magic.”

“Laugh and the world laughs with you!”

“Oh, yes! Fill the churches with dirty thoughts! Introduce honesty to the White House! Write letters in dead languages to people you've never met! Paint filthy words on the foreheads of children! Burn your credit cards and wear high heels! Asylum doors stand open! Fill the suburbs with murder and rape! Divine madness! Let there be ecstasy, ecstasy in the streets! Laugh and the world laughs with you!”

“I should say I am far more cleverer than any of the people who put me here. As a matter of fact, I could leave any time I wanted. It's only a doll house after all. Anyway, I don't mind. I like dolls.Particularly the live ones.”

“We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be.”

“We are the hands and eyes and ears, the sensitive probing feelers through which the emergent, intelligent universe comes to know its own form and purpose. We bring the thunderbolt of meaning and significance to unconscious matter, blank paper, the night sky. We are already divine magicians, already supergods. Why shouldn't we use all our brilliance to leap in as many single bounds as it takes to a world beyond ours, threatened by overpopulation, mass species extinction, environmental degradation, hunger, and exploitation? Superman and his pals would figure a way out of any stupid cul-de-sac we could find ourselves in - and we made Superman, after all. All it takes is that one magic word.”

“If our shallow, self-critical culture sometimes seems to lack a sense of the numinous or spiritual it's only in the same way a fish lacks a sense of the ocean.”

“Writers and artists build by hand little worlds that they hope might effect change in real minds, in the real world where stories are read. A story can make us cry and laugh, break our hearts, or make us angry enough to change the world.”

“Doctor Doom was exactly the sort of bastard who would have armed al-Qaeda with death rays and killer robots if he thought for one second it would piss off the hated Reed Richards and the rest of his mortal enemies in the Fantastic Four, but here he was sobbing with the best of them, as representative not of evil, but of Marvel Comics' collective shock, struck dumb and moved to hand-drawn tears by the thought that anyone could hate America and its people enough to do this.”

“Seven actors have played Batman on the big screen, and if you can name all seven without reading any further, your youth has been wasted.”

“If this book has made any point clear, I hope it's that things don't have to be real to be true. Or vice versa.”

“We've always known we'd eventually be called upon to open our shirts and save the day, and the superhero was a crude, hopeful attempt to talk about how we all might feel on that day of great power, and great responsibility.”

“The interior of our skulls contains a portal to infinity.”

“The only thing that made me, or any of us, special was that no one in the whole of history would ever see the universe exactly the same way any other of us saw it.”

“Superhero science has taught me this: Entire universes fit comfortably inside our skulls. Not just one or two but endless universes can be packed into that dark, wet, and bony hollow without breaking it open from the inside. The space in our heads will stretch to accommodate them all. The real doorway to the fifth dimension was always right here. Inside. That infinite interior space contains all the divine, the alien, and the unworldly we’ll ever need.”

“Individual humans are not super, but the organism of which we are all tiny cellular parts is most certainly that. The life-form that's so big we forget it's there, that turns minerals on its planet into tools to touch the infinite black gap between stars or probe the obliterating pressures at the bottom of the oceans. We are already part of a superbeing, a monster, a god, a living process that is so all encompassing that it is to an individual life what water is to a fish. We are cells in the body of a three-billion-year-old life-form whose roots are in the Precambrian oceans and whose genetic wiring extends through the living structures of everything on the planet, connecting everything that has ever lived in one immense nervous system.”

“In the world of the superheroes, everything had value, potential, mystery. Any person, thing, or object could be drafted into service in the struggle against darkness and evil - remade as a weapon or a warrior or a superhero. Even a little bee named Michael - after God's own avenging angel - could pitch in to win the battle against wickedness.”

“Actually, it's as if [Superman is] more real than we are. We writers come and go, generations of artists leave their interpretations, and yet something persists, something that is always Superman.”

“We tell our children they're trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions, then raise a disapproving eyebrow when, in response, they dress in black, cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, gorge themselves, or kill one another.”

“Before it was a Bomb, the Bomb was an Idea. Superman, however, was a Faster, Stronger, Better Idea.”

“I just wanted all the wars to be over so that we could spend the money on starships and Mars colonies.”

“To know that we are only angels weighed down by filth, free of guilt? The bacteria in our bellies are responsible for the farts which shame us, tiny monsters shitting in their billions all over our pure skin create the acid reek of "our" sweat. And Slade: when the "inner voices" tell us we're unworthy or instruct us to "love" and "hate," despite our best instincts... are these incessant distracting thoughts our own? Or do we only hear the voice of the eternal germ screaming in our heads?”

“Adults...struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real.”

“mmmmen stink! bossss stink! hungry”

“The Hoodmen are far from being the worst of the servants of the Cult of the Unwritten Book, but they are among the most peculiar. You know when you’re trying to remember a word and it’s on the tip of your tongue but you can’t seem to get it out? Well, that’s because the Hoodmen have eaten it. They eat all the words that are on the tips of other people’s tongues. They thrive on misplaced words, savoring all the lost potential of each expression. They’re also able to convert words into electricity. Mr. Steele took an entire phrase.”

“Look at us! Are we not proof that there is no good, no evil, no truth, no reason? Are we not proof that the universe is a drooling idiot with no fashion sense - Mr Nobody on the fundamental philosophy of the Brotherhood of DADA”

“It's not so much that history is simply cyclical, it seems to progress via recursive, repeated fractal patterns with minute variations.”

“Sometimes it’s only madness that makes us what we are.”

“Cassandra Nova impersonating Xavier: Imagine the responsibility of all that destructive potential. The power to crack the firmament and extinguish suns… Imagine that in the wrong hands.”

“EMMA: Ah. There you are. You— little—John Sublime: Shhuhh… Hup. Don’t. Please… My mom met your parents in the Hamptons… I… I go through agonies of conscience every time we have to hurt one of you beautiful creatures… Emma… I’m doing God’s will…EMMA: Shut up! I am very cross about this! Very very very cross indeed! I look like a bloody heavyweight boxer!”

“CYCLOPS: Emma… I knew you wouldn’t turn your back on us.EMMA: Sweet as you are, I didn’t come back for you Scott. I came for my handbag. Lucky for you, this is a Louis Vuitton.”

“PHOENIX: As I was about to say… “Telekinesis” means “mind over matter.”U-Men: I’m not scared… I’ll match your natural powers with my electric blood transfusion.PHOENIX: No… No. I’m sorry, you won’t. All your minds… looking out through those little portholes… Naked insecurities crawling all over you like graffiti… So sad… You’ll be quiet and you’ll listen to someone else for just 5 minutes. Mind over matter? Think back to all that processed food you ate today to help calm your nerves. I’m thinking about it right now. I’m thinking of moving it up.U-Men: Aaautch! Bblaaauuurrr!PHOENIX: And moving it down.U-Men: Oh! Awwwww!PHOENIX: I don’t want you to get hurt but you have to understand… the more you annoy me the more I can’t help thinking about deconstructing you, molecule by molecule, memory by memory… until there’s nothing left but screaming, traumatized atoms. So don’t patronize me. Don’t threaten me. And don’t ever endanger any of my students again. Don’t even think about it. Or I’ll know.”

“Imagine the earth’s population of six billion people reduced to just one hundred representatives. Statistically, that makes 30 white, 70 non-white. It means 6 people own 59% of the wealth and they all live in North America. 80 are in substandard housing. One has an education. One owns a computer. Don’t blame me if it all sounds crazy.”

“It's salt. Why don't you sprinkle some on me, honey? Aren't I just good enough to eat?”

“I loved IRON MAN: Robert Downey Jr. has been and probably will be my favourite actor for a long time…but IRON MAN, THE INCREDIBLE HULK, SUPERMAN RETURNS and all the others feel a little like Saturday morning cartoons next to the carbon black glory that is 'The Dark Knight.'Trust me, *this* is the future of this sort of thing.”

“Animal Man: 'Listen, just tell me one thing: am I REAL or what?'Grant Morrison: 'Of COURSE you're real! We wouldn't be here talking if you weren't real.'You existed long before I wrote about you and, if you're lucky, you'll still be young when I'm old or dead.'You're more real than I am.”

“It's stupid, I know, but I care. All the things that meant so much when we were young. Under the blankets late at night, listening to long-distance radio. All those things lost now or broken. Can you remember? Can you remember that feeling? Perhaps I ought to go to a doctor.”

“I’m a false icon! The media collaborate in promoting my superficial lifestyle as somehow more valid, more worthy of attention than your real lives! - Gideon Stargrave”