"Oscar: In a society where dissenting viewpoints are suppressed, those viewpoints are potent and dangerous... Where dissent is tolerated, it rapidly becomes quaint and is viewed as un-sophisticated; people merely amuse themselves with the expression of contrary opinion. (p. 41)"

"No companies are ever going to pay you enough money to sue them successfully. (pp. 50-51)"

"The greatest mistake you can make is to say that your work is better than a lot of the shit that's out there. No doubt. But being better than shit is not exactly a shining credential. (p. 30)"

"Stop trying to impress some art-school teacher with a stick up his butt whose opinions you never respected from the time you entered his class until you left it 10 years ago. Draw like you. (p. 27)"

"...there is very little about self-publishing a comic book that can be taught, but everything about it can be learned. (p. 21)"

"In any creative field--any creative field--you must first understand that you have no value whatsoever. Your work has no value whatsoever. You are completely worthless. Whatever potential you have is just that--potential--and when you are discussing self-publishing a comic book, you have about the same chance of success as 10 thousand others. (p. 21)"

"The first five years that I did Cerebus I could have made more money baby-sitting (that isn't a joke). Five years. Think about it. (p. 20)"

"In my experience women are like cats. When you don't want them you can't get rid of them and when you do want them it's like trying to pick up lint with a magnet. (p. 267)"

"Because I say what is empirically true: nothing exists except God, I am deemed to be insane. (ibid, p. 28)"

"[A]n attractive lie is always going to be more popular than a hard truth. (No. 11, p. 27)"

"I take it as a given that God's knowledge of the Cerebus storyline dwarfs my own as God's knowledge of everything dwarfs my own. (#2, p. 9)"

"Pointing out that there's a turd lying on the carpet is not the same as shitting on the carpet.(p. 75)"

"Reality is reality. It is the way things are, not the way you want them to be in your head."

"I'd rather take a major financial hit being honest than get rich by lying."

"If you really want to do it nothing and no one is going to stop you, if you don't really want to do it, nothing and no one is going to help you."

"I'd rather live in the gutter embracing reality than live like a king embracing unreality."

"What the feminists and their ventriloquist puppet husbands are talking about doing with Government-Funded Daycare is raising children as if they were a herd of interchangeable swine. No surprise coming from a gender which has no ethics, no scruples, no sense of right and wrong."

"It seems to me a core element of belief in God that a choice is a choice and it eliminates all other choices."

"If something knocks you five degrees out of whack, the journey of a thousand miles that begins with a single step ends up thousands of miles away from its intended destination."

"I'm curious about everything—even things that don't interest me."

"Don't tell me what you believe in. I'll observe how you behave and I will make my own determination."

"Don’t ask me who’s going to replace me because I have no say whatsoever, but I’m sure that if you give them the same love and attention and respect that you have shown me, then they will be a success and the show will continue being a success. And until we meet again, God bless you and goodbye."

"What goes 0-300 in less than 2 seconds? Your mother on a scale."

"The world is only as deep as we can see. This is why fools think themselves profound. This is why terror is the passion of revelation."

"A beggar’s mistake harms no one but the beggar. A king’s mistake, however, harms everyone but the king. Too often, the measure of power lies not in the number who obey your will, but in the number who suffer your stupidity."

"To indulge it is to breed it. To punish it is to feed it. Madness knows no bridle but the knife."

"I tell you, guilt dwells nowhere but in the eyes of the accuser. This men know even as they deny it, which is why they so often make murder their absolution. The truth of crime lies not with the victim but with the witness."

"Love is lust made meaningful. Hope is hunger made human."

"Every monumental work of the State is measured by cubits. Every cubit is measured by the length of the Aspect-Emperor’s arm. And the Aspect-Emperor’s arm, they say, stands beyond measure. But I say the Aspect-Emperor’s arm is measured by the length of a cubit, and that all cubits are measured by the works of the State. Not even the All stands beyond measure, for it is more than what lies within it, and “more” is a kind of measure. Even the God has His cubits."

"If the world is a game whose rules are written by the God, and sorcerers are those who cheat and cheat, then who has written the rules of sorcery?"

"If it is only after that we understand what has come before, then we understand nothing. Thus we shall define the soul as follows: that which precedes everything."

"Give me an arm long enough, and I will reach across the universe and punch myself in the back of the head. Not because I deserve it, but because I can take it."

"Consciousness is something hooked across the top of your nose, like glasses, only as thick as the cosmos."

"To believe in meaning of any sort is to have faith in some version of ‘God.’ Finite or infinite, mortal or immortal, the intentional form is conserved–and as I hope to show, that form is supernatural."

"The difference between the critic and the apologist in philosophy is the difference between conceiving philosophy as refuge, a post hoc means to rationalize and so recuperate what we cherish or require, and conceiving philosophy as exposure, an ad hoc means to mutate thought and so see our way through what we think we cherish or require. ... To truly expose thought is to be willing to let it die… Or become inhuman."

"Our ‘epoch of thinking’ teeters upon the abyssal, a future so radical as to make epic fantasy of everything we are presently inclined to label ‘human.’ Whether it acknowledges as much or not, all thought huddles in the shadow of the posthuman–the shadow of its end... It has been, for better or worse, the thematic impetus behind every novel I have written and every paper I have presented."

"Why break hearts or blow minds when you can rot souls?"

"... science, being science, can only wage total war. No traditional discourse has survived the scientific rationalization of their domain. All of them have been reduced to hokum, expelled from the courts, hounded from policy, from rationality altogether, and relegated to fantasy, which is to say, become commodities sold to balm the superstitious soul."

"I write about the death of magic. All of it."

"Johnston's picture of intentionally rising from the cracks and gaps of an intrinsically contradictory reality happens to be the very ontological trope I use to structure the fantasy world of The Second Apocalypse! The ontological formula he hopes will force change on science is the same ontological formula I use to identify my fiction as fantasy fiction. One of my goals in my epic fantasy series is to demonstrate the seamless nature of the fit between Continental philosophical concepts and magical realities, to explore the affinities one finds in theological and new age appropriations of Continental conceptualities. To show the degree to which humanistic discourse belongs to prescientific cultural ecologies, and so examine the inevitability of its obsolescence."

"It is no accident that fantasy is preoccupied with our pre-Enlightenment, pre-crisis past. The contemporary world is a nihilistic world, where all signs point to the illusory status of love, beauty, goodness and so on. ... Fantasy is the celebration of what we no longer are: individuals certain of our meaningfulness in a meaningful world. The wish-fulfillment that distinguishes fantasy from other genres is not to be the all-conquering hero, but to live in a meaningful world."

"I wanted a literate, socially intricate, and cosmopolitan world - something I could have fun destroying."

"In part, The Prince of Nothing is about the dialogue between these two species of faith, the one that identifies itself with doubt and remains open to the superunknown, the other that identifies itself with certainty and remains blind to the superunknown. It shows how empowered, how manipulable, and how dangerous we become when we think we possess an absolute yardstick."

"Palpable gods. Real magic. A certain, objective moral order. Apocalyptic retribution. The primary difference is that fantasy worlds have dispensed with the belief that comes part and parcel with scriptural worlds. Fantasy allows us to lose ourselves in anthropomorphic worlds without the burden of belief. In this sense, they're scriptural worlds that openly acknowledge themselves as fantastic - which is to say honest scriptural worlds."

"The world is a big place and our brain is only three pounds."

"Any fool can see the limits of seeing, but not even the wisest know the limits of knowing. Thus is ignorance rendered invisible, and are all Men made fools."