Best 290 quotes of Alan Moore on MyQuotes

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.

All culture must have arisen from cult.

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.

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.

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

Anarchy wears two faces, both Creator and Destroyer. Thus Destroyers topple empires; make a canvas of clean rubble where creators can then build a better world. Rubble, once achieved makes further ruins' means irrelevant. Away with our explosives, then! Away with our Destroyers! They have no place within our better world. But let us raise a toast to all our bombers, all our bastards, most unlovely and most unforgivable, let's drink their health, then meet with them no more.

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.

Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images to achieve changes in consciousness

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.

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.

As I see it, a successful story of any kind should be almost like hypnosis: You fascinate the reader with your first sentence, draw them in further with your second sentence and have them in a mild trance by the third. Then, being careful not to wake them, you carry them away up the back alley of your narrative and when they are hopelessly lost within the story, having surrendered themselves to it, you do them terrible violence with a softball bag and then lead them whimpering to the exit on the last page. Believe me, they'll thank you for it.

As people get more desperate, history suggests that they're not going to rise in a mighty proletarian tidal wave and wash away their oppressors. They're gonna turn on each other.

Authority allows two roles: the torturer and the tortured. Twists people into joyless mannequins that fear and hate, while culture plunges into the abyss.

A world grows up around me. Am I shaping it, or do its predetermined contours guide my hand?

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.

Blake understood. Treated it like a joke, but he understood. He saw the cracks in society, saw the little men in masks trying to hold it together...he saw the true face of the twentieth century and chose to become a reflection of it, a parody of it. No one else saw the joke. That's why he was lonely.

But what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that even though I do not know you, and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you. I love you. With all my heart, I love you.

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.

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.

Culture is just a shambling zombie that repeats what it did in life; bits of it drop off, and it doesn't appear to notice.

Despite the constant clamor for attention from the modern world, I do believe we need to procure a psychological space for ourselves. I apparently know some people who try to achieve this by logging off or going without their Twitter or Facebook for a limited period.

Do I believe, for example, that by using magic I could fly? No. How would you get around gravity? Impossible. Do I believe that I might be able to project my consciousness into a very, very vivid simulation of flying? Yeah. Yes, I've done that. Yes, that works.

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

Equality and freedom are not luxuries to lightly cast aside. Without them, order cannot long endure before approaching depths beyond imagining.

Every film is a remake of a previous film, or a remake of a television series that everyone loved in the 1960s, or a remake of a television series that everyone hated in the 1960s. Or it's a theme park ride; it will soon come to breakfast cereal mascots.

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.

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.

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

For me, there is very little difference between magic and art. To me, the ultimate act of magic is to create something from nothing: It's like when the stage magician pulls the rabbit from the hat.

Growing up in the Boroughs, I thought I must be the cleverest boy in the world, an illusion that I was able to maintain until I got to the grammar school.

Happiness is the most insidious prison of all.

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?

I am brother to dragons, and companion to owls. My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat.

I am but a stranger ... as we all are. Lonely inside our separate skins, we cannot know each others pain and must bear our own in solitude. For my part, I have found that walking soothes it; and that, given luck, sometimes we find one to walk besides us ... at least for a little way.

I am watching the stars, admiring their complex trajectories through space and time. I am trying to give a name to the force that set them in motion.

I believe that magic is art, and that art, whether that be music, writing, sculpture, or any other form, is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness… Indeed to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change peoples consciousness, and this is why I believe that an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world to a shaman.

I despise the comic industry, but I will always love the comic medium.

Ideas are bulletproof.

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.

I didn't put you in a prison, Evey. I just showed you the bars.

I enjoy putting my mind into different situations rather than my body.

I don’t distinguish between magic and art. When I got into magic, I realised I had been doing it all along, ever since I wrote my first pathetic story or poem when I was twelve or whatever. This has all been my magic, my way of dealing with it.

I don't like to go to conventions, and I don't like to relate to people on a level of hero worship, because there's no real communication going on there.

I don't really think that very much is interesting about the superhero as an archetype.

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

I don’t think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education from the age of 17 has been self-taught. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for the opportunities the library gave me.

I don't think there's really any difference between art - or writing, or music - and magic. And I particularly draw the link between magic and writing. I think that they are profoundly connected.

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 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.

I'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.