People have asked me why I made the first chapter of my first novel so long, and in an invented English. The only answer I can come up with that satisfies me is, 'To keep out the scum.'
Alan MooreMadness is the emergency exit. You can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. Forever.
Alan MooreI doubt that there are many screenplays of movies that either of us have seen over the past 10 years that were first drafts, or were the work of purely one person. In my world, the actors and the director are all made of paper, and they do exactly what I say. I feel much more in control of the finished work. I feel like the statement that I'm making - even though it's in a medium by no means as glamorous or as widely recognized as film - is at least the statement that I wanted to make. That's a lot more important to me than the allure of working for Hollywood.
Alan MooreOur masters have not heard the people's voice for generations and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.
Alan MooreWhen the persecution of an individual who has exposed an evil is pursued so ruthlessly and yet the evil itself is studiedly ignored, all of us know that there is something very wrong with the way that our society is conducting itself. And if we do not protest in the strongest terms about what is being done in our name, then we become complicit.
Alan MooreThe Conservative Party is a religion in that they are bound together by belief. Almost any organization has its religious aspects.
Alan MooreThere's a widespread cultural barrenness across art and political culture. But there are some pockets of resistance on the extreme margins, like the techno-savvy protest movements, small press, the creator-owned comics, that seem to be getting some signs of hope for the future.
Alan MooreThey say we have we created the man to end all wars; I say we have created a man to end all worlds.
Alan MooreIn 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.
Alan MooreI 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 MooreI've always wanted to explore characters of all races, all genders, all ages. It just seems to me to be a natural way to approach any kind of storytelling.
Alan MooreI'd prefer to include sex scenes alongside the adventure scenes and everyday-life scenes, as if they were all part of the same thing. Which of course they are. Sex is not discrete from the rest of our existence.
Alan MooreI 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.
Alan MooreI'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.
Alan MooreI've had years of bizarre hallucinogenic magical experiences in which I believed I had communicated with entities that may well have been disassociated parts of my own personality or conceivably some independent entity of a metaphysical nature. Both would seem equally interesting.
Alan MooreIdeas, 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.
Alan MooreEvey 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 MooreI’ve known a lot of people go mad over the years, and it is more distressing than people dying. People dying is quite natural, people going mad is the complete antithesis of that.
Alan MooreI'm not a very shy person. I'm just somebody who's got a lot of work and who doesn't like to parade himself in new celebrity contexts.
Alan MooreI suppose that the main drive is to find the edge of something and then throw myself over it.
Alan MooreThere 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 MooreThe 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 MooreMaterial existence is entirely founded on a phantom realm of mind, whose nature and geography are unexplored.
Alan MooreI'm a very smug show-off at heart. I'm altogether too pleased with myself. The big boost for me is to be able to turn out something that I think is pretty marvelous, like 'Lost Girls.' I'm not in it for money, I'm just in it for the glory.
Alan MooreI try to do things in comics that cannot be repeated by television, by movies, by interactive entertainment.
Alan MooreIt's pretty much a fact that our entire universe is a mental construct. We don't actually deal with reality directly. We simply compose a picture of reality from what's going on in our retinas, in the timpani of our ears, and in our nerve endings.
Alan MooreJudged by the stark, sure-footed portrait in Hard Time, Brian Azzarello and Richard Corben clearly have John Constantine down, cold and to the life. Azzarellos grasp of pacing, character and situation resonates through every scene with a black crystal clarity thats short of masterful, while Corben contributes what is, perhaps, one of the most darkly expressive pieces in a long, already-legendary career.
Alan MooreRather than being able to have a healthy relationship with our own sexual imagination, we're driven into some dark corners by shame and embarrassment and guilt, and those dark corners breed all sorts of monsters.
Alan MoorePlease don't worry. It's a psychological complaint, common amongst ex-librarians. You see, she thinks she's a coffee table edition.
Alan MooreLondon has been used as the emblematic English city, but it's far from representative of what life in England is actually about.
Alan MooreYou know what I wish? I wish all the scum of the Earth had one throat and I had my hands about it.
Alan MooreThe magician to some degree is trying to drive him or herself mad in a controlled setting, within controlled laws.
Alan MooreThere's no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There's only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.
Alan MooreIf you look at that incredible burst of fantastic characters that emerged in the late 19th century/early 20th century, you can see so many of the fears and hopes of those times embedded in those characters. Even in throwaway bits of contemporary culture you can often find some penetrating insights into the real world around us.
Alan MooreDan, 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 MooreI 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