Alan Moore Quotes

I was kind of a selfish child, who always wanted things his way, and I've kind of taken that over into my relationship with the world.

As far as I can see, it's not important that we have free will, just as long as we have the illusion of free will to stop us going mad.

I love the smell of paper in the morning; it smells like victory.

I'm dependent on writing for a living, so really it's to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you're going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality.

When I was working upon the ABC books, I wanted to show different ways that mainstream comics could viably have gone, that they didn't have to follow 'Watchmen' and the other 1980s books down this relentlessly dark route. It was never my intention to start a trend for darkness. I'm not a particularly dark individual.

In the sixties, for anybody to suggest that the government didn't have our best interests at heart and policemen sometimes killed people would have automatically made them a radical firebrand lefty. That's not the case anymore.

Magic is a state of mind. It is often portrayed as very black and gothic, and that is because certain practitioners played that up for a sense of power and prestige. That is a disservice. Magic is very colorful. Of this, I am sure.

I'm not personally connected to the Internet, although nearly everyone that I know is, and many of them have a great time and no problems with it. And on the surface you can see that the Internet could go an awful long way to educating, enlightening, informing and connecting the world.

Life is a lot more interesting if you are interested in the people and the places around you. So, illuminate your little patch of ground, the people that you know, the things that you want to commemorate. Light them up with your art, with your music, with your writing, with whatever it is that you do.

Famously, there's not really anywhere to go after nihilism. It's not progressing toward anything, it's a statement of outrage, however brilliant.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

I think there's always been a traditionally apocalyptic side to British science fiction, from H.G. Wells onwards. I mean, most of Wells' stories are potentially apocalyptic in some sense or another.

I love films that are made with almost no budget.

If you give me a typewriter and I'm having a good day, I can write a scene that will astonish its readers. That will perhaps make them laugh, perhaps make them cry - that will have some emotional clout to it. It doesn't cost much to do that.

Since I am me, I find it very difficult to judge how fascinating listening to my nasal, heavily-accented drone for two hours would be to somebody who wasn't me.

Art makes us feel less alone. It makes us think: somebody else has thought this, somebody else has had these feelings.

Of course, Marxism is an example of what Carl Popper would have called a 'World Three' structure, in that it's got immense power as an idea, but you couldn't actually hold up anything in the world and say: 'this is Marxism'.

The Conservative Party is a religion in that they are bound together by belief. Almost any organization has its religious aspects.

I suppose all fictional characters, especially in adventure or heroic fiction, at the end of the day are our dreams about ourselves. And sometimes they can be really revealing.

I like Jacques Derrida; I think he's funny. I like my philosophy with a few jokes and puns. I know that that offends other philosophers; they think he's not taking things seriously, but he comes up with some marvellous puns. Why shouldn't you have a bit of fun while dealing with the deepest issues of the mind?

The one thing with writing stories about the rise of fascism is that if you wait long enough, you'll almost certainly be proved right. Fascism is like a hydra - you can cut off its head in the Germany of the '30s and '40s, but it'll still turn up on your back doorstep in a slightly altered guise.

While the revolution will be certainly televised, it strikes me that there is a strong possibility that the revolution will also be crowd-funded.

You've got to be able to pay your bills; otherwise, you're not going to sleep at night. But beyond that, the world inside my head has always been a far richer place than the world outside it. I suppose that a lot of my art and writing are meant to bring the two together.

I think that in an increasingly virtual world, lovingly produced artefacts are at a premium.

I've never studied anything formally. I was excluded from school at the age of 17, so I am an autodidact, which is a word that I have taught myself.

Most of the people who get sent to die in wars are young men who've got a lot of energy and would probably rather, in a better world, be putting that energy into copulation rather than going over there and blowing some other young man's guts out.

I don't think you can separate a place from its history. I think a place is much more than the bricks and mortar that go into its construction. I think it's more than the accidental topography of the ground it stands on.

I've got nothing against America, but I went over there a couple of times and didn't really like it. I mean, not that I like England that much, but it's somewhere to live.

One of the reasons why I don't leave Northampton is that the people don't treat me like a celebrity. I've been here for years; I'm just that bloke with long hair.

Technology is always a two-edged sword. It will bring in many benefits, but also many disasters.

The roots of the word 'anarchy' are 'an archos,' 'no leaders,' which is not really about the kind of chaos that most people imagine when the word 'anarchy' is mentioned. I think that anarchy is, to the contrary, about taking personal responsibility for yourself.

It has occurred to me that the superhero really only originates in America. That seems to be the only country that has produced this phenomenon.

In comics the reader is in complete control of the experience. They can read it at their own pace, and if there's a piece of dialogue that seems to echo something a few pages back, they can flip back and check it out, whereas the audience for a film is being dragged through the experience at the speed of 24 frames per second.

There's nothing that could get me interested in Hollywood again. And, increasingly, there's nothing that could get me interested in the American comics industry again.

A lot of the critique of our growing mechanization was actually at its strongest, and arguably at its most perceptive, during the late '60s.

Writing is a very focused form of meditation. Just as good as sitting in a lotus position.

A lot of people have found the idea of living your life over and over again absolutely terrifying; there's some people that find it very comforting. There are others that are appalled by it.

I'm remote from most technology to the point that I'm kind of Amish.

Certainly, my many years working in the comics industry, creating products that I do not own, has made me rather fierce on the subject of giving up rights.

Here's the thing: If you're monitoring every single thing that goes on in a given culture, if you have all the information that is there to be had, then that is the equivalent of having none of it. How are you going to process that amount of information?

One of the things I don't like about film is its incredible immersive quality. It's kind of bullying - it's very big, it's very flashy, it's got a lot of weight and it throws it around almost to the detriment of the rest of our culture.

War is a perversion of sex.

No matter how powerful our political and religious leaders think they are, they are as dust before the immense and implacable forces of history and progress. I just hope that they don't make too much of a mess or take too many more people down with them.

My only problem with fans is when they turn pro. For example, when all the professional writers were fired by DC in the '60s, they brought in a generation of comic book fans who would have paid to have written these stories.

If the audience knew what they wanted then they wouldn't be the audience, they would be the artist.

Money's fine if it enables you to enjoy your life and to be useful to other people. But as something that is a means to an end, no, it's useless.

Everything you've ever read of mine is first-draft. This is one of the peculiarities of the comics field. By the time you're working on chapter three of your masterwork, chapter one is already in print. You can't go back and suddenly decide to make this character a woman, or have this one fall out of a window.

Our environments shape the way we see ourselves. If you have been condemned to live in an area that is pretty evidently a rat-run, then sooner or later you're gonna come to the conclusion that you're a rat.

I didn't really sign up to be a celebrity, I only signed up to be a writer.

I find that if I'm watching somebody upon television or in a movie that is on a window ledge or in some high precarious position my hand starts sweating and I get that crawling feeling in the soles of my feet.