Alan Moore...

Alan Moore
From Wikiquote

Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel … with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.

Alan Moore (born 1953-11-18) is a British writer, most famous for his influential work in comic-books.



Sourced
It struck me that it might be interesting for once to do an almost blue-collar warlock. Somebody who was streetwise, working class, and from a different background than the standard run of comic book mystics.
Yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns.
Sexually progressive cultures gave us mathematics, literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust. Not that I’m trying to load my argument, of course.

* It doesn’t even matter if we ever fire these missiles or not. There are having their effect upon us because there is a generation growing up now who cannot see past the final exclamation mark of a mushroom cloud. They are a generation who can see no moral values that do not end in a crackling crater somewhere. I’m not saying that nuclear bombs are at the root of all of it, but I think it is very, very naïve to assume that you can expose the entire population of the world to the threat of being turned to cinders without them starting to act, perhaps, a little oddly.
I believe in some sort of strange fashion that the presence of the atom bomb might almost be forcing a level of human development that wouldn’t have occurred without the presence of the atom bomb. Maybe this degree of terror will force changes in human attitudes that could not have occurred without the presence of these awful, destructive things. Perhaps we are faced with a race between the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse in one line and the 7th Calvary in the other. We have not got an awful lot of mid ground between Utopia and Apocalypse, and if somehow our children ever see the day in which it is announced that we do not have these weapons any more, and that we can no longer destroy ourselves and that we’ve got to do something else to do with our time than they will have the right to throw up their arms, let down their streamers and let forth a resounding cheer.
o On the issue of nuclear weapons, in England Their England : Monsters, Maniacs and Moore (1987)

* It struck me that it might be interesting for once to do an almost blue-collar warlock. Somebody who was streetwise, working class, and from a different background than the standard run of comic book mystics. Constantine started to grow out of that.
o On the creation of the character John Constantine as quoted in "The Unexplored Medium" in Wizard Magazine (November 1993)

* I'm not a millionaire but I'm very comfortable doing what I do, and I'm more productive now than I was in my mid-20s. It's all down to functionality eventually. If you're functional it doesn't matter if you're mad.
o As quoted in "Moore's murderer", in The Guardian (2 February 2002)

* Yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns. If you are on a list targeted by the CIA, you really have nothing to worry about. If however, you have a name similar to somebody on a list targeted by the CIA, then you are dead.
o "The Mindscape of Alan Moore" (2003)

* I've no objection to the term 'graphic novel,' as long as what it is talking about is actually some sort of graphic work that could conceivably be described as a novel. My main objection to the term is that usually it means a collection of six issues of Spider-Man, or something that does not have the structure or any of the qualities of a novel, but is perhaps roughly the same size.
o Interview with Locus Magazine (2003)

* The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.
o "The Mindscape of Alan Moore" (2003)

* Truth is a well-known pathological liar. It invariably turns out to be Fiction wearing a fancy frock. Self-proclaimed Fiction, on the other hand, is entirely honest. You can tell this, because it comes right out and says, "I'm a Liar," right there on the dust jacket.
o In "Correspondence: From Hell" Alan Moore & Dave Sim, part 3, Cerebus #219, (2003)

* Admittedly, I do have several bones... whole war fields full of bones, in fact... to pick with organised religion of whatever stripe. This should be seen as a critique of purely temporal agencies who have, to my mind, erected more obstacles between whatever notion of spirituality and Godhead one subscribes to than they have opened doors. To me, the difference between Godhead and the Church is the difference between Elvis and Colonel Parker... although that conjures images of God dying on the toilet, which is not what I meant at all.
o In "Correspondence: From Hell" by Alan Moore & Dave Sim, conclusion, Cerebus #220 (2003)

* 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.
o "The Craft" - interview with Daniel Whiston, Engine Comics (January 2005)

* Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.
o "The Mustard magazine interview" (January 2005)

* Now, as I understand it, the bards were feared. They were respected, but more than that they were feared. If you were just some magician, if you'd pissed off some witch, then what's she gonna do, she's gonna put a curse on you, and what's gonna happen? Your hens are gonna lay funny, your milk's gonna go sour, maybe one of your kids is gonna get a hare-lip or something like that — no big deal. You piss off a bard, and forget about putting a curse on you, he might put a satire on you. And if he was a skilful bard, he puts a satire on you, it destroys you in the eyes of your community, it shows you up as ridiculous, lame, pathetic, worthless, in the eyes of your community, in the eyes of your family, in the eyes of your children, in the eyes of yourself, and if it's a particularly good bard, and he's written a particularly good satire, then three hundred years after you're dead, people are still gonna be laughing, at what a twat you were.
o "The Craft" - interview with Daniel Whiston, Engine Comics (January 2005)

* The DC comics were always a lot more true blue. Very enjoyable, but they were big, brave uncles and aunties who probably insisted on a high standard of you know mental and physical hygiene. Whereas the Stan Lee stuff, the Marvel comics, he went from one dimensional characters whose only characteristic was they dressed up in costumes and did good. Whereas Stan Lee had this huge breakthrough of two-dimensional characters. So, they dress up in costumes and do good, but they've got a bad heart. Or a bad leg. I actually did think for a long while that having a bad leg was an actual character trait.
o Interview on BBC Radio 4 (27 January 2005)

* I despise the comic industry, but I will always love the comic medium.
o New York Press interview, 2006-06-15)

* Originally I was content to just simply accept the money, that was offered when people had adapted my comic books into films. Eventually I decided to refuse to accept any of the money for the films, and to ask if my name could be taken off of them, so that I no longer had to endure the embarrassment of seeing my work travested in this manner. The first film that they made of my work was "From Hell" Which was an adaptation of my "Jack the Ripper" narrative... In which they replaced my gruff Dorset police constable with Johhny Depp's Absinthe-swigging dandy. The next film to be made from one of my books was the regrettable "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"... Where the only resemblance it had to my book was a similar title. The most recent film that they have made of mine is apparently this new "V for Vendetta" movie which was probably the final straw between me and Hollywood. They were written to be impossible to reproduce in terms of cinema, and so why not leave them simply as a comic in the way that they were intended to be. And if you are going to make them into films, please try to make them into better ones, than the ones I have been cursed with thus far.
o From the BBC2 show The Culture Show (9 March 2006) (separate quotes shown; edited together for the segment of the show)

* Sexually progressive cultures gave us mathematics, literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust. Not that I’m trying to load my argument, of course.
o "BOG VENUS VERSUS NAZI COCK-RING: Some Thoughts Concerning Pornography" in Arthur magazine, Vol. 1, No. 25 (November 2006)

* There is an inverse relationship between imagination and money.
o About the film adaptation of V for Vendetta, in an MTV interview "Alan Moore : The Last Angry Man"

[edit] Swamp Thing (1983–1987)
There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse is often closer to the truth.

This is just a sample, for more from this work, see Saga of the Swamp Thing.

* There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse is often closer to the truth.
o "Down Among the Dead Men", Swamp Thing Annual #2, 1985

* Murder? Don't talk to me about murder. I invented murder!
o Cain, Saga of the Swamp Thing #33

* You can't kill a vegetable by shooting it in the head.
o Floronic Man, Saga of the Swamp Thing #21 (The Anatomy Lesson)

* There is a house above the world, where the over-people gather.
There is a man with wings like a bird.
There is a man who can see across the planet and wring diamonds from its anthracite.
There is a man who moves so fast that his life is an endless gallery of statues.
In the house above the world, the over-people gather...
And sit...
And listen...
...To a dry, mad voice that whispers of Earthdeath.
o Swamp Thing #24
Watchmen (1986–1987)

These are just a few samples; for more from this work see Watchmen

The horror is this: In the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness. We are alone. There is nothing else.
We’re all puppets, Laurie. I’m just a puppet who can see the strings.

Rorschach: The city is afraid of me, I have seen its true face.

* Watchmen # 1

Laurie Juspeczyk (Silk Spectre): Hey, you remember that guy? The one who pretended to be a supervillain so he could get beaten up?
Dan Dreiberg (Nite Owl): Oh, You mean Captain Carnage. Ha ha ha! He was one for the books.
Laurie: You're telling me! I remember, I caught him coming out of this jeweller's. I didn't know what his racket was. I start hitting him and I think "Jeez! He's breathing funny! Does he have asthma?
Dan: Ha Ha Ha. He tried that with me, only I'd heard about him, so I just walked away. He follows me down the street… broad daylight, right? He's saying "PUNISH me!" I'm saying "No! Get lost!"
Laurie: Ha Ha Ha. What ever happened to him?
Dan: Well, he pulled it on Rorschach, and Rorschach dropped him down an elevator shaft.
Laurie: PHAAA HA HA HA! Oh, God, I'm sorry, that isn't funny, Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!
Dan: Ha Ha Ha! No, I guess it's not...
Laurie:Ahuh. Ahuhuhuh...Jeez, y'know, that felt Good. There don't seem to be that many laughs around these days.
Dan: Well, what do you expect? The Comedian is Dead.

* Watchmen # 1

* I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to pretend it looked like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn’t. It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat, glistening grubs writhing blindly, squirming over each other, frantically tunneling away from the light. But even that is avoiding the real horror. The horror is this: In the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness. We are alone. There is nothing else.
o Dr. Malcolm Long, Watchmen #6

* We’re all puppets, Laurie. I’m just a puppet who can see the strings.
o Doctor Manhattan, in Watchmen #9

* "In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends."
o Dr. Manhattan, Watchmen #12

Batman : The Killing Joke (1988)

* When you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there's always madness. Madness is the emergency exit.

* I've demonstrated there's no difference between me and everyone else! All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.

V for Vendetta (1989)

This is just a sample, for more from this work, see V for Vendetta.

People shouldn't be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

* In fact, let us not mince words… the management is terrible! We’ve had a string of embezzlers, frauds, liars, and lunatics making a string of catastrophic decisions. This is plain fact. But who elected them? It was you! You who appointed these people! You who gave them the power to make decisions for you! While I’ll admit that anyone can make a mistake once, to go on making the same lethal errors century after century seems to me to be nothing short of deliberate. You have encouraged these malicious incompetents, who have made your working life a shambles. You have accepted without question their senseless orders. You have allowed them to fill your workplace with dangerous and unproven machines. All you had to say was “No.” You have no spine. You have no pride. You are no longer an asset to the company.

* Happiness is the most insidious prison of all.

* Did you think to kill me? There's no flesh and blood within this cloak to kill. There is only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.

[edit] What Is Reality?
Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is.

"What Is Reality?" (written for television)

* Reality, at first glance, is a simple thing: the television speaking to you now is real. Your body sunk into that chair in the approach to midnight, a clock ticking at the threshold of awareness. All the endless detail of a solid and material world surrounding you. These things exist. They can be measured with a yardstick, a voltammeter, a weighing scale. These things are real.

* Consciousness is unquantifiable, a ghost in the machine, barely considered real at all, though in a sense this flickering mosaic of awareness is the only true reality that we can ever know.

* The Here-and-Now demands attention, is more present to us. We dismiss the inner world of our ideas as less important, although most of our immediate physical reality originated only in the mind. The TV, sofa, clock and room, the whole civilisation that contains them once were nothing save ideas.

* Material existence is entirely founded on a phantom realm of mind, whose nature and geography are unexplored.

* Ancient cultures did not worship idols. Their god-statues represented ideal states which, when meditated constantly upon, one might aspire to. Science proves there never was a mermaid, blue-skinned Krishna or a virgin birth in physical reality. Yet thought is real, and the domain of thought is the one place where gods inarguably exist, wielding tremendous power. If Aphrodite were a myth and Love only a concept, then would that negate the crimes and kindnesses and songs done in Love's name? If Christ were only ever fiction, a divine Idea, would this invalidate the social change inspired by that idea, make holy wars less terrible, or human betterment less real, less sacred?

* Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map. Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is.

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.
Alan Moore

Don't leave home without your sword - your intellect.
Alan Moore

Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.
Alan Moore

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.
Alan Moore

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'.
Alan Moore

To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate - unlike most films.
Alan Moore

To some degree Satanism is purely a kind of disease of Christianity. You've got to really be Christian to believe in Satan.
Alan Moore

War is a perversion of sex.
Alan Moore

"Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky." — Alan Moore

"Stood in firelight, sweltering. Bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night.

Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else.

Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.

Was Rorschach.

Does that answer your Questions, Doctor?"
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"People shouldn't be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people."
— Alan Moore (V for Vendetta)

"Behind this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea... and ideas are bulletproof."
— Alan Moore (V for Vendetta)

"Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, "Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up." Man bursts into tears. Says, "But doctor...I am Pagliacci."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"No. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.
And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.

But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!.

Yes. Anybody in the world. ..But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come...dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes... and let's go home."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"My mother said I broke her heart...but it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, but it's all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us...but within that inch we are free."
— Alan Moore (V for Vendetta)

"That pompous phrase (graphic novel) was thought up by some idiot in the marketing department of DC. I prefer to call them Big Expensive Comics."
— Alan Moore

"VI VERI VENIVERSUM VIVUS VICI
By the Power of Truth, I, while living, have Conquered the Universe."
— Alan Moore

"I think that storytelling and creation are very close to what the center of what magic is about. I think not just for me, but for most of the cultures that have had a concept of magic, then the manipulation of language, and words, and thus of stories and fictions, has been very close to the center of it all."
— Alan Moore

"Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself."
— Alan Moore (V for Vendetta)

"All we ever see of stars are their old photographs."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"You know what I wish? I wish all the scum of the Earth had one throat and I had my hands about it."
— Alan Moore (Absolute Watchmen)

"None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with YOU. You're locked up in here with ME."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"Look at him now, poor fellow. That's what a dose of reality does for you...Never touch the stuff myself, you understand. Find it gets in the way of the hallucinations."
— Alan Moore

"Truth is a well-known pathological liar. It invariably turns out to be Fiction wearing a fancy frock. Self-proclaimed Fiction, on the other hand, is entirely honest. You can tell this, because it comes right out and says, "I'm a Liar," right there on the dust jacket."
— Alan Moore

"We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"Nite Owl II: But the country's disintegrating. What's happened to America? What's happened to the American dream?

The Comedian: It came true. You're lookin' at it."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious."
— Alan Moore

"There are people.

There are stories.

The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse if often closer to the truth.

Stories shape the world. They exist independently of people, and in places quite devoid of man, there may yet be mythologies."
— Alan Moore (Swamp Thing Vol. 2: Love and Death)

"Evey Hammond: Who are you?
V: Who? Who is but the form following the function of what and what I am is a man in a mask.
Evey Hammond: Well I can see that.
V: Of course you can. I'm not questioning your powers of observation I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is"
— Alan Moore

"There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"Swamp Thing, in Hell: "Demon...How...could God...allow such a place?

Etrigan: Think you God built this place, wishing man ill and not lusts uncontrolled or swords unsheathed?

Not God, my friend. The truth's more hideous still: These halls were carved by men while yet they breathed.

God is no parent or policeman grim dispensing treats or punishments to all.

Each soul climbs or descends by its own whim. He mourns, but He cannot prevent their fall.

We suffer as we choose. Nothing's amiss. All torments are deserved..."
— Alan Moore

"Roschach's Journal: October 12th, 1985
Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.

The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown.

The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "Save us!"... and I'll look down and whisper "No."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"Eve: All this riot and uproar, V... is this Anarchy? Is this the Land of Do-As-You-Please?

V: No. This is only the land of take-what-you-want. Anarchy means "without leaders", not "without order". With anarchy comes an age or ordnung, of true order, which is to say voluntary order... this age of ordung will begin when the mad and incoherent cycle of verwirrung that these bulletins reveal has run its course... This is not anarchy, Eve. This is chaos."
— Alan Moore

"This city is dying of rabies. Is the best I can do to wipe random flecks of foam from its lips?"
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"It's funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they're related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there's a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?"
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"God is in the rain."
— Alan Moore (V for Vendetta)

"If light is outlawed, then only outlaws will be able to see where they're going."
— Alan Moore (Tomorrow Stories)

"Real life is messy, inconsistent, and it's seldom when anything ever really gets resolved. It's taken me a long time to realize that."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"In order to be able to make it, you have to put aside the fear of failing and the desire of succeeding. You have to do these things completely and purely without fear, without desire. Because things that we do without lust of result are the purest actions we shall ever take."
— Alan Moore

"If you wear black, then kindly, irritating strangers will touch your arm consolingly and inform you that the world keeps on turning.

They're right. It does.

However much you beg it to stop.

It turns and lets grenadine spill over the horizon, sends hard bars of gold through my window and I wake up and feel happy for three seconds and then I remember.

It turns and tips people out of their beds and into their cars, their offices, an avalanche of tiny men and women tumbling through life...

All trying not to think about what's waiting at the bottom.

Sometimes it turns and sends us reeling into each other's arms. We cling tight, excited and laughing, strangers thrown together on a moving funhouse floor.

Intoxicated by the motion we forget all the risks.

And then the world turns...

And somebody falls off...

And oh God it's such a long way down.

Numb with shock, we can only stand and watch as they fall away from us, gradually getting smaller...

Receding in our memories until they're no longer visible.

We gather in cemeteries, tense and silent as if for listening for the impact; the splash of a pebble dropped into a dark well, trying to measure its depth.

Trying to measure how far we have to fall.

No impact comes; no splash. The moment passes. The world turns and we turn away, getting on with our lives...

Wrapping ourselves in comforting banalities to keep us warm against the cold.

"Time's a great healer."

"At least it was quick."

"The world keeps turning."

Oh Alec—

Alec's dead."
— Alan Moore (Swamp Thing Vol. 5: Earth to Earth)

"Much of magic as I understand it in the Western occult tradition is the search for the Self, with a capital S. This is understood as being the Great Work, as being the gold the alchemists sought, as being the Will, the Soul, the thing we have inside us that is behind the intellect, the body, the dreams. The inner dynamo of us, if you like. Now this is the single most important thing that we can ever attain, the knowledge of our own Self. And yet there are a frightening amount of people who seem to have the urge not just to ignore the Self, but actually seem to have the urge to obliterate themselves. This is horrific, but you can almost understand the desire to simply wipe out that awareness, because it’s too much of a responsibility to actually posses such a thing as a soul, such a precious thing. What if you break it? What if you lose it? Mightn’t it be best to anesthetize it, to deaden it, to destroy it, to not have to live with the pain of struggling towards it and trying to keep it pure? I think that the way that people immerse themselves in alcohol, in drugs, in television, in any of the addictions that our culture throws up, can be seen as a deliberate attempt to destroy any connection between themselves and the responsibility of accepting and owning a higher Self and then having to maintain it."
— Alan Moore

"American love — like coke in green glass bottles...they don't make it anymore."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"I thought as much. Miss Murray, though I am a beast, do not think that I am stupid. I know that I am hideous and hateful. I am not loved, nor ever hope to be. Nor am I fool enough to think that what I feel for you is love.
But in this world, alone, I do not hate you. And alone in this world, you do not hate me."
— Alan Moore (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1)

"In order to be able to make it, you have to put aside the fear of failing and the desire of succeeding. You have to do these things completely and purely without fear, without desire. Because things that we do without lust or result are the purest actions we shall ever take."
— Alan Moore

"Don't leave home without your sword - your intellect."
— Alan Moore

"We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"It's cold and it's mean spirited and I don't like it here anymore."
— Alan Moore

"MEMORY'S SO TREACHEROUS. ONE MOMENT YOU'RE LOST IN A CARNIVAL OF DELIGHTS, WITH POIGNANT CHILDHOOD AROMAS, THE FLASHING NEON OF PUBERTY, ALL THAT SENTIMENTAL CANDY-FLOSS...

THE NEXT, IT LEADS YOU SOMEWHERE YOU DON'T WANT TO GO...

...SOMEWHERE DARK AND COLD, FILLED WITH THE DAMP, AMBIGUOUS SHAPES OF THINKS YOU'D HOPED WERE FORGOTTEN.

MEMORIES CAN BE VILE, REPULSIVE LITTLE BRUTES. LIKE CHILDREN, I SUPPOSE. HAHA.

BUT CAN WE LIVE WITHOUT THEM? MEMORIES ARE WHAT OUR REASON IS BASED UPON. IF WE CAN'T FACE THEM, WE DENY REASON ITSELF!

ALGHOUGH, WHY NOT? WE AREN'T CONTRACTUALLY TIED DOWN TO RATIONALITY!

THERE IS NO SANITY CLAUSE!

SO WHEN YOU FIND YOURSELF LOCKED ONTO AN UNPLEASANT TRAIN OF THOUGHT, HEADING FOR THE PLACES IN YOUR PAST WHERE THE SCREAMING IS UNBEARABLE, REMEMBER THERE'S ALWAYS MADNESS.

MADNESS IS THE EMERGENCY EXIT...

YOU CAN JUST STEP OUTSIDE, AND CLOSE THE DOOR ON ALL THOSE DREADFUL THINGS THAT HAPPENED. YOU CAN LOCK THEM AWAY...

FOREVER."
— Alan Moore (Batman: The Killing Joke)

"Well, what do you expect? The Comedian is dead."
— Alan Moore (Absolute Watchmen)

"It is the oldest ironies that are still the most satisfying: man, when preparing for bloody war, will orate loudly and most eloquently in the name of peace."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"Everybody is special. Everybody. Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. Everybody. Everybody has their story to tell."
— Alan Moore (V for Vendetta)

"I shall die here. Every last inch of me shall perish. Except one. An inch. It's small and it's fragile and it's the only thing in the world worth having. we must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us."
— Alan Moore (V for Vendetta)

"We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors"
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"Please don't worry. It's a psychological complaint, common amongst ex-librarians. You see, she thinks she's a coffee table edition... "
— Alan Moore (Batman: The Killing Joke)

"There's a notion I'd like to see buried: the ordinary person. Ridiculous. There is no ordinary person."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate — unlike most films."
— Alan Moore

"Happiness is the most insidious prison of all."
— Alan Moore (V for Vendetta)

"The past can't hurt you anymore. Not unless you let it. They made you into a victim, Evey. They made you into a statistic. But, that's not the real you. That's not who you are inside."
— Alan Moore (V for Vendetta)

"Remember, remember the fifth of November of gunpowder treason and plot. I know of no reason while gun powder treason should ever be forgot."
— Alan Moore (V for Vendetta)

"The dusk reeks of fornication and bad consciences."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"I live my life free of compromise, and step into the shadows without complaint or regret."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"It seems strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses, and apologized to no one."
— Alan Moore (V for Vendetta)

"In our every cell, furled at the nucleus, there is a ribbon two yards long and just ten atoms wide. Over a hundred million miles of DNA in very human individual, enough to wrap five million times around our world and make the Midgard serpent blush for shame, make even the Ourobouros worm swallow hard in disbelief. This snake-god, nucleotide, twice twisted, scaled in adenine and cytosine, in thymine and in guanine, is a one-man show, will be the actors, props and setting, be the apple and the garden both. The player bides his time, awaits his entrance to a drum-roll of igniting binaries. This is the only dance in town, this anaconda tango, this slow spiral up through time from witless dirt to paramecium, from blind mechanic organism to awareness. There, below the birthing stars, Life sways and improvises. Every poignant gesture drips with slapstick; pathos; an unbearably affecting bravery. To dare this stage, this huge and overwhelming venue. Squinting through the stellar footlights, hoping there's an audience, that there's someone out there, but dancing anyway. But dancing anyway."
— Alan Moore (Snakes and Ladders)

"Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"As I see it, part of the art of being a hero is knowing when you don't need to be one anymore."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"Why do we argue? Life's so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"Nothing's that simple, not even things that are simply awful."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagines past"
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"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."
— Alan Moore

"When the gap between the world of the city and the world my grandfather had presented to me as right and good became too wide and depressing to tolerate, I'd turn to my other great love, which was pulp adventure fiction. Despite the fact that [he] would have had nothing but scorn and loathing for all of those violent and garish magazines, there was a sort of prevailing morality in them that I'm sure he would have responded to. The world of Doc Savage and The Shadow was one of absolute values, where what was good was never in the slightest doubt and where what was evil inevitably suffered some fitting punishment. The notion of good and justice espoused by Lamont Cranston with his slouch hat and blazing automatics seemed a long way from that of the fierce and taciturn old man I remembered sitting up alone into the Montana night with no company save his bible, but I can't help feeling that if the two had ever met they'd have found something to talk about. For my part, all those brilliant and resourceful sleuths and heroes offered a glimpse of a perfect world where morality worked the way it was meant to. Nobody in Doc Savage's world ever killed themselves except thwarted kamikaze assassins or enemy spies with cyanide capsules. Which world would you rather live in, if you had the choice?"
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"Consciousness, unprovable by scientific standards, is forever, then, the impossible phantom in the predictable biologic machine, and your every thought a genuine supernatural event. Your every thought is a ghost, dancing."
— Alan Moore (Promethea: Book Five)

"There seems to be an audience that demands everything be explained to them that everything be easy. And I don t think that s doing us any good as a culture. The ease with which we can accomplish or conjure any possible imaginable scenario through CGI is almost directly proportionate to how uninterested we re becoming in all of this. I can remember Ray Harryhausen s animated skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts. I can remember Willis O Brien s King Kong. I can remember being awed at the artistry that had made those things possible. Yes I knew how it was done. But it looked so wonderful. These days I can see half a million Orcs coming over a hill and I am bored. I am not impressed at all. Because frankly I could have gotten someone a passerby on the street who could have gotten the same effect if you d given them half a million dollars to do it. It removes artistry and imagination and places money in the driver s seat and I think it s a pretty straight equation—that there is an inverse relationship between money and imagination. "
— Alan Moore

"Dan, I'm not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"The superman exists and he's American."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"We are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head - and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself."
— Alan Moore

"I sat on the bed. I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to make it look like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn't. It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat, glistening grubs writhing blindly, squirming over each other, frantically tunneling away from the light. But even that isn't the real horror. The horror is this: in the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"Rorshach's journal. October 16, 1985. Been waiting in Moloch's fridge for three hours. Ate two raw eggs and packet of honey mustard sauce. Just realized I am sitting on baking soda. Freezing ass off. Really have to take leak."
— Alan Moore

"We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"I'm the idea of the human imagination, which, when you think about it, is the only thing we can really be certain ISN'T imaginary."
— Alan Moore (Promethea: Book Five)

"Our consciousness, a startling outgrowth of the universe, is possibly its most important part, the fraction of existence that can think, feel, marvel at itself."
— Alan Moore (Promethea: Book Five)

"They say we have we created the man to end all wars; I say we have created a man to end all worlds."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"Sexually progressive cultures gave us literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust."
— Alan Moore (25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom)

"Sex is glorious, it's how we all got here, and it's most people's favorite activity."
— Alan Moore

"I leave the human cockroaches to discuss their heroin and child pornography."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"We have labored long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We've seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.
-V"
— Alan Moore (V for Vendetta)

"Yes, of course, the whole idea is utterly inane, but to let its predictable inanities blind you to its truly fabulous and breathtaking aspects is to do both oneself and the genre a disservice."
— Alan Moore (Swamp Thing Vol. 1: Saga of the Swamp Thing)

"The only reality we can ever truly know is that of our perceptions, our own consciousness, while that consciousness, and thus our entire reality, is made of nothing but signs and symbols. Nothing but language.
Even God requires language before conceiving the Universe. See Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word."
— Alan Moore (Promethea: Book Five)

"A choking dry-ice smog of disappointment, pooling in the drops and troughs of suddenly uncertain ground. Mudyards, wit here and there the smoking wrecks of ideologies, their wheels and radios gone. River of litter rustling in a swollen course below the sky's black drag and in the ditches mustard gas, a mulch of sodden colouring books, imploded television sets.

These are the fretful margins of twentieth century, the boomtowns ragged edge, out past the sink estates, the human landfill, where the wheelchair access paving quakes, gives way like sphagnum moss beneath our feet. It’s 1999, less like date than like a number we restore to in emergencies. pre-packaged in its national front hunting. It’s millennial mummy-wraps. The zeitgeist yawns, as echoing and hollow as the Greenwich dome.

It’s April 10th; we find ourselves in red lion square....caught in the crosshairs of geography and time like sitting ducks, held always by surface tension of the instant, by the sensory dazzle. Constant play of light on neural ripples. Fluttering attention pinned to where and when and who we are. The honey-trap of our personal circumstance, of our familiar bodies restless in these chairs."
— Alan Moore (Snakes and Ladders)

"Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I can think of no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t’was his intent
To blow up the King and Parli’ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England’s overthrow;
By God’s providence he was catch’d
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!"
— Alan Moore

"Through my fingers, grains of sand fall randomly, an unorganized beam of silica that seems to be pregnant of all conceivable forms... But everything is an illusion. Things have their forms not only in space, but also in time. Like thick blocks of marble that brings encrusted in them, statues in the future."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! YOU'VE READ ABOUT IT IN THE NEWSPAPERS! NOW, SHUDDER AS YOU OBSERVE, BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES, THAT MOST RAREAND RAGIC OF NATURE'S MISTAKES!

I GIVE YOU... THE AVERAGE MAN!

PHYSICALLY UNREMARKABLE, IT HAS INSTEAD A DEFORMED SET OF VALUES.

NOTICE THE HIDEOUSLY BLOATED SENSE OF HUMANITY'S IMPORTANCE. THE CLUB-FOOTED SOCIAL CONSCIENCE AND THE WITHERED OPTIMISM.

IT'S CERTAINLY NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH IS IT?

MOST REPULSIVE OF ALL, ARE ITS FRAIL AND USELESS NOTIONS OF ORDER AND SANITY. IF TOO MUCH WEIGHT IS PLACED UPON THEM...

... THEY SNAP.

HOW DOES IT LIVE, I HEAR YOU ASK?

HOW DOES THIS POOR, PATHETIC SPECIMEN SURVIVE IN TODAY'S HARSH AND IRRATIONAL WORLD?

THE SAD ANSWER IS 'NOT VERY WELL."
— Alan Moore

"As I come to understand Vietnam and what it implies about the human condition, I also realize that few humans will permit themselves such an understanding."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"The central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history."
— Alan Moore

"I still can't believe it . . . him comin' here everyday, nobody realizin'. Still, that's life: lotta stuff happens under the waterline."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"It's early days. A few skeletons are boumd to keep jumping out of the closet."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"I thought, "Well if I'm gonna react might as well overreact!"
— Alan Moore

"Now everything is wonderful and hazardous and nothing's hypothetical."
— Alan Moore

"Bond believes we are his pawns. He thinks no-one observes his game. But I am No-One. I observe everything, and to play with Nemo is to play games with Destruction."
— Alan Moore (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1: The Absolute Edition)

"In heaven's name be a man, sir! Your pitiful whining sickens me!"
— Alan Moore (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1)

"... the most probable of all my theorems, is that life is ordered by the principles of some religion so peculiar and obscure it has no followers, and none may fathom it, nor know the rituals by which to court its favour."
— Alan Moore (Voice Of The Fire)

"It's only those exceptional and rare individuals who have brilliant ideas delivered to them by the muse, complete and gift wrapped. The rest of us have to work at it."
— Alan Moore

"War is a perversion of sex."
— Alan Moore

Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free. - Valerie Page"
— Alan Moore (V for Vendetta)