Grant Morrison...

disinformation: grant morrison transcript
by Richard Metzger/Transcribed by Loz of Barbelith.com - November 10, 2002
http://old.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id987/pg1/index.html

Editor's Note: This Disinformation interview was transcribed by l.pycock@virgin.net>Tiresias of Barbelith Underground, one of the best online communities devoted to Grant Morrison's milieu (and other mind-warping topics).

TITLES
Throughout the interview, covers and artwork flash onscreen, mainly from The Invisibles, and occasionally ones from Doom Patrol, Arkham Asylum and other Grant Morrison comics.

Richard Metzger

Hello and welcome to Disinfo Nation, I'm Richard Metzger. On tonight's show the man responsible for warping more minds of this generation than any other lone individual. He's wanted by the authorities for his frontal assault against reality

(A 'Wanted: Grant Morrison' poster from much earlier on in his career, when he still had hair, flashes onscreen.)

and for various assorted crimes against reason. Lock up your women, it's that charming genius of the comics world, Grant Morrison tonight, on Disinfo Nation.

Disinfo.Con 2000

Richard Metzger
(Speaking to audience.)

I promised it was about to get 'wacky' and that shoe is about to drop. If there is anyone who deserves to be called 'The Heir to William Burroughs' I think it's our next guest. The possessor of one of the most incredible imaginations on the planet and we're incredibly lucky to have him here as The Invisibles winds down to two last issues . . . Ladies and gentlemen I give you, Grant Morrison.

(Applause. Metzger leaves to stage right, Grant Morrison saunters on, trying to look like King Mob overdosing on cool, doesn't quite make it, as a little grin breaks at the corners of his mouth. He heads to the podium, bends to the microphone, then screams.)

Grant Morrison

WOOOOOOOOOW! Here we are! Right! Fuck man, I tell you when I was a kid I read Robert Anton Wilson and all this shit and here we are, we're standing here, talking about this shit and it's real! OK, I'm pissed

(Holds up red beaker.)

and in half an hour I'm gonna come up on drugs, so watch for it!

(Audience laughter.)

I guess, I don't know, is there any practising magicians in the audience? Put your hand up if we got any? Yeah? Come on!

(Puts his hand up.)

Bold! OK, a few. OK, by the time we finish this you're all going to be practising magicians. This shit's easy right?

I'm like you right? Basically, why are we here, right? Why are we here, at this time, what's this all about, and by the way this is a Scottish accent so reset the filters and pretend itsh Shean Connery talking to you OK? Double-Oh-Sheven. So, if you can follow me, I'm just gonna talk the way I talk and fuck you if you don't understand me!

The deal is this: I've been writing this comic for the last six years and the weird thing is, like you, like everyone here, we're trying to figure, what's going on? Why do we feel different? Why don't we fit into this world? Why do we think they're not telling us the truth?

So, I went out and I read Robert Anton Wilson's books when I was 20 years old, which is 20 years ago now, and I figure, is this guy bullshitting me? He says we can talk to aliens, we can talk to people from Sirius, is he talking crap? He said Aleister Crowley's got methods for contacting alien intelligences and for changing the world, is he talking crap? So I did it and, no, he's not talking crap!

Right, and we can all do it!

And this is, urr, by way of trying to demolish the counter-culture and replace it with something useful. We're just gonna start here and see where we get to.

When I started doing The Invisibles, which is a comic book for people who don't - who haven't seen the thing, it's a comic book which is kinda my attempt to explain what had happened to me after I'd been abducted by aliens in Kathmandu in 1994 and the only reason I was abducted by aliens in Kathmandu in 1994 was because I went to Kathmandu in 1994 to be abducted by aliens!

(Laughs.)

And it works right!

(Applause.)

And these fuckers, they will turn up!

INTERVIEW

Richard Metzger

Dateline - Los Angeles California. We track Grant Morrison, best-selling comics writer in the world, to his room in the trendy Standard hotel on the Sunset Strip. It was here, against the glittery backdrop of a Hollywood dream factory, where this interrogation took place.

(Onscreen Caption: Grant Morrison - Crimes Against Reason. The interview is done with Richard Metzger in the foreground right, Grant Morrison diagonally opposite and they're sitting by the window or on some sort of balcony and it's night.)

Richard Metzger

First up, what brings you to Los Angeles?

Grant Morrison
Well, basically the idea is to try and make some money you know? Because this is the place where bullshit turns in to money and that's an area of magic that always interested me, just the idea of turning pure thought into pure cash and this is the place where light becomes money. I think it's a very weird place to be in, none of it connects, I mean, you're living here as well, but it doesn't add up, but it's interesting that way because it's all of it an illusion, everything's a fake here and I kinda like that and I kinda want to get involved in it and see if I can profit from it.

Richard Metzger

What do you see right now as your relationship to what's being produced by the Hollywood culture machine?

Grant Morrison

I think what's happening, in my terms anyway, is what I'm seeing is that ideas that were once marginalised that normally I like to play with ten or fifteen years ago in the comics books have become the mainstream culture, the lifeblood of the movies and the TV and the records, everything we watched and listened to, you know?

There's Buffy on the TV, we've got The Matrix in the cinema, Gnostic ideas are burgeoning everywhere, ideas about the supernatural, the occult, the power of magic, the disintegration of reality and they're all come from this place.

They've become mainstream and they've been fed back in to our lives as 'the Spectacle' you know? It's the best Spectacle we've ever had.

Richard Metzger

But why do you think these ideas have, all these marginal ideas, have become mainstreamed?

Grant Morrison

I think it has to happen. Even in the sense that we've all grown up with and can now make them mainstream, and that's exactly what we seem to be doing, we're selling weirdness back in to the culture and the culture does demand it. The culture has come to us, looking for ideas once they would've hidden under a mossy stone and ignored.

Then suddenly, y'know, things got boring, they ran out of heroic muscle men, they run out of Rambos, they run out of the entire Reagan-Thatcher's driven philosophy that we were all going on, and suddenly they've turned to the freaks and the weirdoes and the outcasts and the geeks and the beatniks and the hippies and whoever's left to provide some infusion of interest into a flagging culture. And it seems to be working.

The interesting thing is that it's bending their culture towards our culture to the point where the two things become interchangeable. There's no difference between them I think.

Richard Metzger

When you started The Invisibles in 1995 what was your intention? There was a grand idea behind it.

Grant Morrison
(Nods.)

I mean, the comic had two starts, one was a false start where all I wanted to do was a William Burroughs version of Jack Kirby's The Boy Commandos because I thought it was such a cool name and DC owned the characters so you had Boy Commandos that just sounds like a Burroughs story, so it started out as this basic notion of psychic boy scouts and Baden-Powell was involved in it at one point but, it just completely changed and they said well this is so far from the original that why should they leave the title and why don't you just make something up and I went through Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and found the 'Invisibles'. So that was it.

The first four issues I knew it was gonna be a boy's initiation in to this occult secret society. Then in issue 2 I went to Kathmandu and had basically an alien abduction experience. And that changed the entire series because what I then wanted to do with the series was to make something that was alive rather than just tell a story, I wanted to do something that was a spell, that actually moved, that people who'd read it would be changed by it or would be led in to situations whereby they might be changed.

And also, ultimately, to simulate the experience that I had in Kathmandu, which I don't have any explanation for and in The Invisibles I went through every possible one: I read Whitley Strieber, I read Philip K. Dick, I read everyone who'd reported this type of unusual experience and the parameters are all the same, all their nervous systems reported slightly differently and used their own sci-fi language or technological language or mythological language depending on who they are.

But ultimately the thing's the same and it's like the shamanic process whereby you appear to be taken out of reality into a higher dimension, the body is stripped and destroyed and then you are put back with extra knowledge which then leads in to weird synchronicities and unusual experiences which began to proliferate as The Invisibles was being written so the whole thing - I was living that comic as a diary, as it was being written and the occult stuff in it and the martial arts, that's all real stuff and as it was happening it was going in to the comic so it's probably about 60% biography in there.

Richard Metzger

I'm gonna pry open that last answer a little bit here.

First up, what happened to you in Kathmandu? What was the alien visitation experience like?

Grant Morrison

The short version is that I was sitting up on the roof garden of the BajaRat Hotel and this thing happened and - it's hard to describe, we're going into areas that are unusual, so all I remember is getting back downstairs and laying on the bed and - some unusual things happened, and then it seemed like there were entities in the room it was like those silver morphing blobs you see in rave videos. It was like computer generated things and they claimed to be cross-sections of fifth-dimensional entities as expressed through four-dimensional spacetime and they claimed that I was one of them and that I had to come back and see what the old homestead was like. And that was when I felt like I was peeled off the surface of spacetime and they took me out of my body and then to what seemed to be the fifth dimension because I could see the entirety of space and time as a dynamic object in which Shakespeare was over here, and I was over here and the dinosaurs were here and we were all in the same object, and time was a thing.

So, I appeared to be in a fifth dimensional fluid, an information space that I could say was maybe kinda bluish, extending out infinitely. These things swam through it and interacted with it and they told me that what the universe was, was a larval form of what they are, which is fifth-dimensional entities. And the only way to grow a fifth-dimensional entity is to plant it in time, henceforth our universe.

Richard Metzger

I remember you telling me this story once before and you were saying it was like you could pick lint off of your sweater and then throw it up in the air and it would surround you in a different kind of environment.

Grant Morrison

I was trying to describe how they make universes and they said they could make them by detaching parts of their substance and plugging them into the surrounding fluid, the medium, the fifth-dimensional information fluid that we're all swimming through and when you did that, when you plugged in a fractal component of yourself into the universe it would grow around you and become another one of these universes and the idea was that those of us who knew, who had this experience were supposedly midwives for this larva. Because we remembered and you'd go back and you're constantly trying to encourage the larva forward because it has to go, I mean it could die, it could just as easily die, but this one seems to work, I've got a feeling this one works.

Richard Metzger

So it wasn't scary.

Grant Morrison

Not at all, no. It was monumental, it was soul-shaking but it wasn't scary.




disinformation: grant morrison transcript
by Richard Metzger/Transcribed by Loz of Barbelith.com - November 10, 2002

Richard Metzger
(Grins.)

What was the next day like?

Grant Morrison

The next day was the oddest thing. I was buzzing, I wrote like 200 pages in a notebook to try and get it down. And then tries to explicate it for the next six years.

(Laughs.)

And now you know I can just dismiss it.

Richard Metzger

Now you can turn it in to a big Hollywood film and make a couple of million dollars.

Grant Morrison

Well hopefully!

(Commercial break.)

Richard Metzger

For people who haven't read the series, out there in TV land, how would you describe it?

Grant Morrison

Well, the plot-line is fairly labyrinthine and baroque but basically what we have is the James Bonds of the counterculture, these super-cool - five super-cool terrorist, anarchist, occultists who operate in a cell as part of a vast organisation which may or may not exist called The Invisibles which has existed since the dawn of time to fight against tyranny and oppression and slavery and everything that's supposed to be bad in the world.

So, initially we set up this kind of conflict, the classic kind of good and evil or freedom versus slavery conflict, the Invisibles were on the side of love, laughs and libido basically! And the bad guys are on the side of George Bush and Margaret Thatcher and everyone that tries to run our lives and tell us what to do.

And the Invisibles cell attempts recruit this young kid from Liverpool, a very violent punk, he's not even a punk, he doesn't call himself a punk, he's just a kid off of the streets of Liverpool who takes Ecstasy and steals cars and does that sort of thing but happens to be or is believed to be the Buddha of the future, the technological Buddha of the 21st century. And they have to recruit him but before the other side recruit him and use him to hasten the apocalypse.

And that was our plot line and through that, you know, there were lots of other things come in to it. There's time-travel, things go on - the whole thing looks at time like an object that connects all the characters through time. We've got previous Invisibles groups in 1924 who do things which connect and vibrate through the ether which turn out to be important in the present day or things that go backwards through time so the whole thing kind of exists in its own little continuum which has it's own beginning and end but it's meant to intersect with the real world and there are parts of real things which happened which go in to the comic like the death of Diana or like the fact that surveillance cameras were getting ahold of Britain, everything tied in so beautifully to the dynamic of it but ultimately what happens in the comic is that that plotline and that setup is subjected to certain rigorous destruction that something else emerges by the end of it which I don't want to say too much to people who haven't read it yet but it is - we've taken the classic good and evil conflict or anarchy v repression and tried to resolve it in to something at the end so we've set up this pretty high concept

(He says over a picture of Fanny urinating from series 3.)

but I think the philosophy's more important than the plot in the book.

Disinfo.con 2000

(Onscreen Caption/Slide: 'Magick in Theory and Practice', then in handwriting: 'I Will Get what I want' with the vowels and repeated letters crossed out.)

Grant Morrison
(Takes a swig from his cup and manages to spill half of it down his front)

Punk rock dude! This is a Donna Karan suit, fuck it!

(Audience laugh)

So leading on from these ridiculous, where do you go from that? I found out that if you do these things which you are told by Aleister Crowley, by Wilson, by all these people that we read, by all these people that we've been consuming but we don't do it, if you actually do what they say, things happen.

Things occur exactly as it's described and we can all do it.

So I decided to put this to use in the comic book I was doing, this thing called The Invisibles, and the idea was to kind of

(Pauses.)

get all this down on paper and somehow look at it, not to accept it as reality, to accept it as purely this is a part of human experience. It's a part of human experience which has been described to us for thousands and thousands of years but for the last two hundred has been hidden and made occult, for some reason which I don't understand but seems to have to do with the Industrial Revolution and corporate culture.

So these things happen, magic works. And when I started doing the comic I found you could actually make magic happen by writing things and changing the operating system of the universe. It works! And I'm here to tell you to try it when you go home tonight because it fucking works and what happens if we all do it, everyone in this room decides to take control of reality, I'm talking about reality, I'm talking about quantum physics, I'm talking about taking control of things from the quantum level up, from the molecular level up and it works. This magic works.

So I'll tell you something you can do while we're here. One of the best techniques and one of the easiest techniques to prove this thing works is to practice sigil magic. First thing you do, write down a desire, make it something easy, that is likely to happen, something possible rather than say 'I'm gonna be King of the Moon' which you may want to be as we all do but it's kinda hard to be King of the Moon you've got to get a rocket and go up there, so pick something easy. If you want to sigilize for a lottery win make sure you buy a ticket or else it won't work. So these are the conditions within the material universe that we live in.

One of the things we're actually dealing with is some - as I say, some kind of operating system that can be hacked using words. And words seem to be the binding agent for this thing, whatever it is.

So, roundabout in 1997 I decided I would really serious turn this thing in to some kind of super-sigil and it was based on the idea of - if you look at cave-art, the first art was done, the first writing was done basically as art, and if someone wanted to make something happen like if you were some fucked-up caveman in the caves somewhere, moaning about your dinner, what do you do? You draw a bison on the wall, stick some spears in it, go out and the bison dies filled with spears. And "Hey man!" we can make this happen.

Slowly those things become letters, they become words, they become reduced to abstractions, complexes of meaning, and you can take that basic idea, people like Austin Osman Spare, the magician from the early part of this century, or Crowley, or the chaos magicians from the 80s who were a big inspiration on me.

They used this stuff, and what you can do is this, like I say, you can try this at home. Write down a desire

(Illustrated slides flash in the background.)

Quite simple say 'It is my desire that my cat wins the Olympics'. Haha. Take out all the vowels. Write this down for fucks sake, and do it! Don't just listen, do it!

Right, Take out the vowels, then you'll be left with a string of consonants. Take out the repeated consonants and you'll be left with a string of consonants that will have no repeats in it you know X, Y, A, D, whatever. Turn that thing in to a little image. Take the D, draw a big D, you've got a T, draw a T under it, keep reducing it down until it looks magical and there are no rules for this thing, do it until it looks magical. At that point you now have a sigil. The sigil will work, you can project desire in to reality and change reality. It works!

(Applause.)

This is verifiable. People have been telling us about this for thousands of years. Even the Tibetans have been telling us about this, the Mesopotamians have been telling us about this, and why has it been made occult? Because Coca-Cola have got the secret, these people know what we're talking about here because what you do is you create a sigil, Coca-Cola is a sigil, the McDonalds 'M' is a sigil, these people are basically turning the world in to themselves using sigils. And if we don't reverse that process and turn the world in to us using sigils, we're going to be living in fucking McDonalds! Magic is accessible to everyone, the means of altering reality is accessible to everyone, and when everyone starts doing it we're going to see our desire manifest on a gigantic scale.

Everyone's desire. What happens when everyone's desire becomes manifest?

Cut to:

INTERVIEW OVER CREDITS

Grant Morrison

People get streamed, they actually believe there's a lot more, there's a, uh, there's a lot more hierarchical caste system goes on in this culture than we think. In the sense of why are there always policemen why is there never a sense of there's no policemen any more? You know, we always stream just enough people in to these roles and suddenly we're filling the roles that once Timothy Leary or William Burroughs filled but we get born and suddenly we streamed in to those ones and there'll be kids right behind us who do it. So all we can ever hope to be is some kind of leading edge of oddball ideas that refresh the culture behind us because we're always a little bit ahead of what's popular and what's fashionable. And that's why it seems cool, because it's a little bit hidden and a little bit hard to understand.

But ultimately it gets swept up, you know, The Matrix is mainstream so those ideas that to me were very unusual and abstruse back in 1994 and now they're the vocabulary of every kid who can afford to go nd see a movie.

The views expressed above represent the writer and not necessarily those of The Disinformation Company Ltd.
http://old.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id987/pg1/index.html

On Comics

• I love to work in the comics medium -- I really do -- and I've realised that a total contempt for the intelligence of the audience is the key to success. You know that Doom Force thing I did recently for D.C.? -- the pisstake of X-Force, right? Well, eighty percent of the people who sent letters of comment in on the story actually took the thing seriously! They didn't see the joke! It's horrific. Tom Peyer phoned me up and read page after page of these insane letters. That was the turning point. That is the moment that I became a super-villain. (1992) [1]

• I see no reason why children as young as six, seven, or even three shouldn't be allowed to produce corporate comic books to relentless monthly deadlines. And have to write several titles at once to make a decent living. That's what a proper childhood's all about isn't it? This is the 21st century after all and these unruly little bastards have been milking post-Victorian sentimentality for all it's worth for way too long. Time to get kids back where they belong - up chimneys, down mines, and tied to the printing presses! If you can pick up a brick to smash a car window, then you can build me a textile factory, son ... here's a whole half dollar for your day's labor. Now put down that Justin Timberlake bio-comic and get back on the production line! (2003) [2]

• Let's face it; regular monthly superhero comic books have taken on the look and smell of old men's pants. It's hardly a surprise comics lost the teenage audience or that the adult audience is now bored and irritated by the endless recycling of images they've already seen and words they've already read. (2003) [3]

• Truthfully, the job security in this business is uncertain, the hours are long, long and lonely, the audience is increasingly small, fickle and dissatisfied, like 3 of the 7 Dwarves. Respect is nonexistent, success fleeting; you'd be better off in a boy band, where at least you'd get laid before they made you obsolete. (2004) [4]

• Most of the people who do this kind of work, do it out of love, like the love you'd show to an ailing friend. (2004) [5]

• The comics medium is a very specialized area of the Arts, home to many rare and talented blooms and flowering imaginations and it breaks my heart to see so many of our best and brightest bowing down to the same market pressures which drive lowest-common-denominator blockbuster movies and television cop shows. Let's see if we can call time on this trend by demanding and creating big, wild comics which stretch our imaginations. Let's make living breathing, sprawling adventures filled with mind-blowing images of things unseen on Earth. Let's make artefacts that are not faux-games or movies but something other, something so rare and strange it might as well be a window into another universe because that's what it is. (2004) [6]

• As for all this talk I keep hearing about how 'ordinary people' can't handle the weird layouts in comics - well, time for another micro-rant, but that's like your granddad saying he can't handle all the scary, fast-moving information on Top of the Pops and there's really only one answer. Fuck off, granddad. If you're too stupid to read a comic page, you shouldn't be trying to read comic books and probably don't. (2004) [7]

• (On Frank Miller's comic book 'Holy Terror, Batman!') Batman vs. Al Qaeda! It might as well be Bin Laden vs. King Kong! Or how about the sinister Al Qaeda mastermind up against a hungry Hannibal Lecter! For all the good it's likely to do. Cheering on a fictional character as he beats up fictionalized terrorists seems like a decadent indulgence when real terrorists are killing real people in the real world. I'd be so much more impressed if Frank Miller gave up all this graphic novel nonsense, joined the Army and, with a howl of undying hate, rushed headlong onto the front lines with the young soldiers who are actually risking life and limb 'vs' Al Qaeda. [8]

• (On DC: One Million) I just read it again and liked it a lot. Comics were definitely happier, breezier and more confident in their own strengths before Hollywood and the Internet turned the business of writing superhero stories into the production of low budget storyboards or, worse, into conformist, fruitless attempts to impress or entertain a small group of people who appear to hate comics and their creators. [9]

On The X-Men

• The 'Planet X' story was partially intended as a comment on the exhausted, circular nature of the X-Men's ever-popular battle with Magneto and by extension, the equally cyclical nature of superhero franchise re-inventions. I ended the book exactly where I came on board, with Logan killing Magneto AGAIN, as he had done at the end of Scott Lobdell's run. Evil never dies in comic book universes. It just keeps coming back. Imagine Hitler back for the hundredth time to menace mankind. (2004) [10]

• What people often forget, of course, is that Magneto, unlike the lovely Sir Ian McKellen, is a mad old terrorist twat. No matter how he justifies his stupid, brutal behaviour, or how anyone else tries to justify it, in the end he's just an old bastard with daft, old ideas based on violence and coercion. I really wanted to make that clear (when writing New X-Men). (2004) [11]

On Superman

• Superman should be a huge, positive role model, an almost Christ-like force.

On Magic

• '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. (2004) [12]

• 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) [13]

• 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. (2005) [14]

On Life

• "Real life?" What's that? (2003) [15]

• 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) [16]

• When Nietzsche said God is dead, he forgot to mention that Satan died in the same horrific accident. [17]

• Otherwise, I know I’m often wasting my breath and electronic ink saying this, but the “real-world” 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” doesn’t come with the neat thee-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, it‘s 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 it’s cool to season our comfortable fictions with at least a little taste of what actual reality is like. [18]

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. (2005) [19]

On The Matrix

• It's really simple. The truth of that one is that design staff on The Matrix were given Invisibles collections and told to make the movie look like my books. This is a reported fact. The Wachowskis are comic book creators and fans and were fans of my work, so it's hardly surprising. I was even contacted before the first Matrix movie was released and asked if I would contribute a story to the website. (...) I'm not angry about it anymore, although at one time I was, because they made millions from what was basically a Xerox of my work and to be honest, I would be happy with just one million so I didn't have to work thirteen hours of every fucking day, including weekends. (2005) [20]

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 well-regarded 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. (2004) [23]

Attributed

• I really do think that the battlelines have been drawn. I want to see comics as a pop medium, I want to see the Forbidden Planet empire reaching out to every city in the world like McDonald's. I want to see comic creators and retailers in Vogue and on telly, but ranged against that brilliant global vision are the cornershop bankers who just want to sneak home with their brown paper bags and their Betty Page video's and who're just desperate to keep comics at the level of stamp collecting and train-spotting because they can't face up to the glare of the real world. Which side will you be on? -- its as simple as that. (1992)

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grant_Morrison

"Metaphor is one of a group of problem-solving medicines known as figures of speech which are normally used to treat literal thinking and other diseases."
— Grant Morrison (The Filth)

"Enough madness? Enough? And how do you measure madness? - The Joker"
— Grant Morrison (Batman: Arkham Asylum)

"From now on, I'm opting for ontological terrorism."
— Grant Morrison (The Invisibles Vol. 6: Kissing Mister Quimper)

"Your head's like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune's all we are."
— Grant Morrison (The Invisibles Vol. 1: Say You Want a Revolution)

"Only nothing is impossible."
— Grant Morrison

"Hell is only the Cringe Eternal and the Place of our Self's Undoing. When Nietzsche proclaimed "God is Dead!" he forgot to add that Satan is also dead and we are free from all that antique tat."
— Grant Morrison

"I couldn't think of one clever way to stop this guy, so I just trusted to mindless violence."
— Grant Morrison (Doom Patrol Vol. 1: Crawling from the Wreckage)

"One must commit acts of the highest treason only when dressed in the most resplendent finery."
— Grant Morrison (Sebastian O)

"Talking to oneself, I have often thought, is the best way to be sure of intelligent and witty conversation."
— Grant Morrison (Sebastian O)

"It's quite possible we may actually be looking at some kind of super-sanity here. A brilliant new modification of human perception, more suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century...He creates himself each day. He sees himself as the lord of misrule and the world as a theatre of the absurd."
— Grant Morrison (Batman: Arkham Asylum)

"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"
— Grant Morrison

"He read me extracts from a medical journal describing the progress of a staphylococcus aureus infection. And then he pleasured me with a potato."
— Grant Morrison

"Abandon the 'I', because it's a lie."
— Grant Morrison

"We're the new power, come to replace the old. Cameras in the head, children with microchips, spin doctors rewriting reality as it happens. "
— Grant Morrison

"The perfect fascist state needs to operate in conditions of perpetual warfare. Have you ever noticed how the world has been in constant crisis since World War II?"
— Grant Morrison (The Invisibles Vol. 6: Kissing Mister Quimper)

"This is the end of our sentence"
— Grant Morrison

"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."
— Grant Morrison

"May in Varanasi. 25° and wet. It's like the 6th circle of the inferno here, Edith - where they flail the arses off the howling heretics and the men who fuck marine life etc. NATO's stomping on the Balkans while India and Pakistan threaten one another with nukes. "Dead From the Waist Down" on MTV. The humidity's making me horny and mad. I miss Robin. In his new book, Ken Wilbur calls it "skin hunger". I feel like I'm building up a charge. Monsoon's on its way."
— Grant Morrison

"I run blindly through the madhouse ... And I cannot even pray ... For I have no God."
— Grant Morrison (Batman: Arkham Asylum)

"When was the last time you had a thought that wasn't put there by THEM?"
— Grant Morrison (The Invisibles Vol. 1: Say You Want a Revolution)

"There's a palace in your head, boy. Learn to live in it always."
— Grant Morrison (The Invisibles Vol. 1: Say You Want a Revolution)

"Look at it, Dane. Look at the city and the world in its proud array, like a cask of jewels laid open for you. It'll offer you everything you ever wanted but it's just pictures on billboards; dream cars, dream women, dream houses.

Time to wake up now and say goodbye.

Remember, Dane: there's other worlds out there. It's only empty air here. Jump out of the world, jump to the place I showed you and you'll not fall.

Are you ready? Are you ready to jump right off the edge of everything?"
— Grant Morrison (The Invisibles Vol. 3: Entropy in the UK)