QUOTES OF GRANT MORRISON

On Magic

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 "Sigil" as a word is out of date.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.

"Grant Morrison: Master & Commander" by Christopher Butcher, Part 4 : Highway X

Everything is literally entangled, it can all be communicated with and affected 'at a distance'

because there is no distance, only a simulation of apparent separation which our limited
consciousness feeds us second by second at 11 bits. The 'telepathy' which brings people
together is no more or less supernatural or unlikely than the 'telepathy' which brings two of your
fingers together when you think about it. Patience, participation and constant
close observation of what's going on, on the inside and on the outside will soon make you a fine
sorcerer, if that's what you want to be. (2004)[12]

I got so enmeshed in (The Invisibles) that I was producing holographic voodoo effects and
found that I could make stuff happen just by writing about it. At the conclusion of volume one, I
put the King Mob character in a situation where he was being tortured and he gets told that his
face is being eaten away by bacteria and within a few months my own face was being eaten
away by infection. I still have the scar. It's a pretty cool scar too but at the time it was really
distressing. Then I had the character dying and within a few months, there I was dying in the
hospital of blood poisoning and staph aureus infection. As I lay dying, I wrote my character out of
trouble and somehow survived. I used the text as medicine to get myself out of trouble. Writing
became a way of keeping myself alive. As soon as I was out of hospital I made sure my
character had a good time and got a laid a lot and within months I was having the time of my life.

On Life

"Real life?" What's that? (2003) [14]

I'd say to myself or whoever I was with, 'It'll look good in the biography.' and then I'd go
ahead and do whatever daft thing it was - like taking acid on the sacred mesa or doing the
bungee-jump, getting the haircut, dancing with the stranger, talking to the crowd - whatever I
was 'scared' of mostly, or fancied doing, or never dared before, I'd try it on the basis that it would
make for a more interesting read one day. (2004) [15]

When Nietzsche said God is dead, he forgot to mention that Satan died in the same horrific
accident. [16]

Otherwise, I know Im often wasting my breath and electronic ink saying this, but the realworld is a pretty weird place where lots of inexplicable things happen all the time, and I
like to catch the flavor of that too. It just seems more modern and authentic to me as a
storyteller. The real world doesnt come with the neat three-act structures and resolutions we
love to impose on it, and if repeated doses of movie and TV-storytelling have convinced anyone
that it does, its time to get out and about a bit. The real world is filled with ghost stories, non
sequiturs, inexplicable mysteries, dead ends and absurdities, and I think its cool to season
our comfortable fictions with at least a little taste of what actual reality is like. [17]

Most human lives are forgotten after four generations. We build our splendid houses on the
edge of the abyss then distract and dazzle ourselves with entertainers and sex while we slowly
at first, then more rapidly, spin around the ever-thirsty plughole in the middle. My treasured
possessions -- all the silly little mementoes and toys and special books Ive carried with me for
decades -- will wind up on flea market tables or rot on garbage heaps. Someone else will inhabit
the rooms that were mine. Everything that was important to me will mean nothing to the
countless generations that follow our own. In the grand sprawl of it all, I have no significance at
all. I dont believe a giant gaseous pensioner will reward or censure me when my body stops
working and I dont believe individual consciousness survives for long after brain death so I lack
the consolations of religion. I wanted Annihilator to peek into that implacable moment where
everything we are comes to an end so I had to follow the Black Brick Road all the way down and
seriously consider the abject pointlessness of all human endeavours. I found these
contemplations thrilling and I was drawn to research pure nihilism, which led me to Ray
Brassiers Nihil Unbound and back to Ligotti. I have a fundamentally optimistic and positive view
of human existence and the future and I think its important to face intelligent, well-argued
challenges to that view on a regular basis. While I agree with Ligotti that the universe is, on the
face of it, a blind emergent process, driven by chance over billions of years of trial and error to
ultimately produce creatures capable of little more than flamboyant expressions of the agonizing
awareness of their own imminent deaths, I dont share his slightly huffy disappointment at this
state of affairs. If the universe is intrinsically meaningless, if the mindless re-arrangement of
atomic debris into temporarily arising then dissipating forms has no point, I can only ask, why do

I see meaning everywhere, why can I find a point in everything? Why do other human beings
like me seem to see meaning in everything too? If the sun is only an apocalyptic series of
hydrogen fusion reactions, why does it look like an angel and inspire poetry? Why does the flesh
and fur-covered bone and jelly of my cats face melt my heart? Is all that surging, roaring
incandescent meaning inside me, or is it out there? Meaning to me is equivalent to Magic.
The more significance we bring to things, even to the smallest and least important things, the
more special, the more magical they seem to become. For all that materialistic science and
existential philosophy tells us we live in a chaotic, meaningless universe, the evidence of my
senses and the accounts of other human beings seem to indicate that, in fact, the whole
universe and everything in it explodes second-to-second with beauty, horror, grandeur and
significance when and wherever it comes into contact with consciousness. Therefore, its
completely down to us to revel in our ability to make meaning, or not. Ligotti, like many extreme
Buddhist philosophers, starts from the position that life is an agonizing, heartbreaking gravebound veil of tears. This seems to be a somewhat hyperbolic view of human life; as far as I can
see most of us round here muddle through ignoring death until it comes in close and lifes mostly
all right with just enough significant episodes of sheer joy and connection and just enough sh-tty
episodes of pain or fear. The notion that the whole span of our lives is no more than some
dreadful rehearsal for hell may resonate with the deeply sensitive among us but by and large life
is pretty okay generally for most of us. And for some, especially in the developed countries,
okay equals luxurious. To focus on the moments of pain and fear we all experience and then to
pretend they represent the totality of our conscious experience seems to me a little effete and
indulgent. Most people dont get to be born at all, ever. To see in that radiant impossibility only
pointlessness, to see our experience as malignantly useless, as Ligotti does, seems to me a bit
camp.

On Writing
We're so familiar with written language that we sometimes forget how outlandish a concept it must
have seemed to our ancestors. Writing allowed people to copy and transfer their thoughts and their
tribal codes of conduct to others, even unto generations they themselves would not live to personally
instruct, affect or control. The words themselves must have seemed alive and immortal and as "holy"
as ghosts. Written law was thus a way of mastering time and influencing the future, a weapon
greater than fire and steel, I hope you'll agree. When read, the written word made the head buzz and
ring and fill up with voices and commands from nowhere, as if God Himself had come thundering
down through the symbols, off the page and into the room, fertilising and impregnating the mind with
his Ghostly, unmistakable presence.

On Himself

I use media exposure as a means of playing with multiple personalities. Each interview is a
different me and they're all untrustworthy (2000) [21]

My work ethic is rigorous, brutal, and uncompromising. I've had my pension plans in place
for a long time and I never spend more than I have or forget to pay my tax bills. My repressed,
inner Protestant is an absolute Godsend in that respect. I also have lots of highly-paid and wellregarded work outside the comics field now and with Jupiter in the second house on my
horoscope, I shouldn't have to worry too much about my dotage. I love the future and it loves
me. (2003) [22]

I must admit to being increasingly deranged by the kinds of bizarre myths which have grown
like moss around my name in comics fan circles - I keep coming up against this idiot savant
image; me reflected back at myself as a shambling, incoherent drug addict, wanking and
drooling out meaningless gibberish which can only be understood by 'those lying bastards' who
claim they can see 'Magic Eye' 3-d pictures and wee men reading the news on the TV.