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'm 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.

I don't think any of us grew up into the world we were hoping for or expecting.

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.

Right from the outset, the prevailing mindset in British comics fandom was a radical and progressive one. We were all proto-hippies, and we all thought that comics would be greatly improved if everything was a bit psychedelic like Jim Steranko.

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.

I'm very pessimistic about adaptations from one medium to another. I've got a very kind of primitive, Puritan view of it. I tend to think that if something was derived for one medium, then there's no real immediate reason to think that it's necessarily going to be as good or better if adapted into another one. There have been very good stage plays that have made some very good films. But there are not so many differences between the theater and the cinema as there are between the cinema and, say, reading a book or reading a comic.