Top 60 Alan Moore Quotes

When I’m putting a story together, I generally know the ending and a couple of the points halfway through, and I’ve got sort of an idea about the beginning, and although I do write the story one sentence at a time, when I’m thinking it up, I’m thinking it up all at once.

War never accomplishes anything. It’s never going to look good in the history books. People are never going to look back and think, ‘He started a lot of wars; what a great leader he was!’ That’s not the way it works. God knows how many more of these things we’re going to need before it starts to sink in.

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.

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.

There has been a rather unpleasant sensibility apparent in Frank Miller’s work for quite a long time.

When alchemists were talking about turning lead to gold, they were talking about turning a leaden consciousness, which most of us exist in during our lives, into a golden consciousness, which is a much better place to be.

Television and movies have short-circuited reality. I don’t think a lot of people are entirely clear on what is real and what is on the screen.

In the human mind, the number of possible connections that can be made between neurons greatly exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.

I really can’t be bothered going to a barber. And shaving every morning, that’s nightmarish. I spent my teenage years covered in tiny little bits of toilet paper.

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.

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.

In many ways, my entire graphic novel career was a long diversion. Originally, all I wanted to do was to be an underground cartoonist and maybe bring out a groovy underground mag.

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

War is a perversion of sex.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I suppose when I was writing ‘V for Vendetta’ I would in my secret heart of hearts have thought: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if these ideas actually made an impact?’ So when you start to see that idle fantasy intrude on the regular world… It’s peculiar.

I increasingly fear that nothing good can come of almost any adaptation, and obviously that’s sweeping. There are a couple of adaptations that are perhaps as good or better than the original work. But the vast majority of them are pointless.

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

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.

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

I genuinely like the people I meet at signings or the bits of public talking that I do.

It is my belief that all gods are stories, or at least the ideas behind stories, but stories or ideas that have become in some way almost alive and aware.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’ve never watched any of the adaptations of my books. I’ve never wanted to, and there’s absolutely no chance of me doing so in the future.

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.

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

I’m not a particularly dark individual. I have my moments, it’s true, but I do have a sense of humor.

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.

When I started writing comics, ‘comics writer’ was the most obscure job in the world! If I wanted to be a celebrity, I would have become a moody English screen actor.

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 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.

I think that the Occupy movement is, in one sense, the public saying that they should be the ones to decide who’s too big to fail.

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.

I love films that are made with almost no budget.

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

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.

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.

One of the advantages of travelling the world is that you get to know the world broadly. And one of the advantages of staying in one place is that you get to know the world deeply.

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.

I’ve developed a theory that there’s an inverse relationship between money and imagination. That if you’ve got lots of imagination then you don’t really need much money, and if you’ve got lots of money then you won’t bother with much imagination.