Art & Creativity Quote by Garth Ennis

What makes this line land is how aggressively it deflates the romance of the “mission” narrative while still admitting the temptation of it. Ennis starts with the boyish glow of a very specific fantasy: Where Eagles Dare, the mid-century template for heroic competence under impossible odds. That reference isn’t incidental; it’s genre as shorthand for purpose, clarity, and a world where violence has clean lines and courage reliably cashes out as meaning.

Then he kills it in real time. The sentence is a long, apologetic sprawl full of hedges (“I think,” “some sort of,” “maybe”), like someone backing away from a pitch meeting with himself. The subtext is self-censorship, but not the cowardly kind: it’s an experienced writer recognizing when an idea is just borrowed adrenaline. “It really sort of died” reads like a shrug, yet it’s also a quiet ethical move. Ennis has built a career interrogating macho mythmaking; here you can hear that internal editor refusing to dress up whatever subject he’s circling (war, risk, adventure, maybe even nonfiction) as a fun caper.

The hardest punch is the last clause: “doing the book was out of the question.” It suggests external constraints (time, access, publishers) but also a deeper refusal to launder complexity into a digestible product. The wit isn’t in a punchline; it’s in the anticlimax. He lets the heroic premise evaporate, and in that evaporation you see the actual stakes: reality rarely grants a plot, and integrity sometimes means walking away from the story you wish you had.