Alan Moore famous quotes

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.
-- Alan Moore

#World #Advantage #Travel The World

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.
-- Alan Moore

#Children #Selfish #Taken

What does fighting crime mean, exactly? Does it mean upholding the law when a woman shoplifts to feed her children, or does it mean struggling to uncover the ones who, quite legally, have brought about her poverty?
-- Alan Moore

#Children #Struggle #Mean

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

#Growing Up #Hands #World

My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of ***** if you're lucky.
-- Alan Moore

#Life #Cowboy #Inspire

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

#Lying #Simple #Men

The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.
-- Alan Moore

#Believe #Comforting #Banking

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

#Spiritual #Perception #Consciousness

You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it.
-- Alan Moore

#Honesty #Long #Forget

There's no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There's only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.
-- Alan Moore

#Blood #Ideas #Flesh

Once you realize what a joke everything is, being the Comedian is the only thing that makes sense.
-- Alan Moore

#Humor #Comedian #Realizing

Everybody is special. Everybody. Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. Everybody. Everybody has their story to tell.
-- Alan Moore

#Life #Hero #Cheer Up

Remember, remember the fifth of November of gunpowder treason and plot. I know of no reason why the gun powder treason should ever be forgot.
-- Alan Moore

#Gun #Plot #November

You can’t buy that kind of empowerment. To just know that as far as you are aware, you have not got a price; that there is not an amount of money large enough to make you compromise even a tiny bit of principle that, as it turned out, would make no practical difference anyway. I’d advise everyone to do it, otherwise you’re going to end up mastered by money and that’s not a thing you want ruling your life.
-- Alan Moore

#Differences #Empowerment #Principles

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.
-- Alan Moore

#School #Thinking #Opportunity

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

#Lying #Believe #Artist

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.
-- Alan Moore

#Reality #Thinking #Ideas

Never despair. Never surrender.
-- Alan Moore

#Despair #Surrender #Never Surrender

Our masters have not heard the people's voice for generations and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.
-- Alan Moore

#Voice #People #Generations

Behind this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea... and ideas are bulletproof.
-- Alan Moore

#Ideas #Flesh #Mask

Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history's fingers, down it goes.
-- Alan Moore

#Long #Empires #Fingers

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

#Home #Intellect

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.
-- Alan Moore

#Zombie #Culture

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

#Progress #Nihilism #Brilliant

You've got to be able to pay your bills, otherwise you're not going to sleep at night. But beyond that, the world inside my head has always been a far richer place than the world outside it. I suppose that a lot of my art and writing are meant to bring the two together.
-- Alan Moore

#Art #Writing #Sleep

Truly, whoever we are, wherever we reside, we exist upon the whim of murderers.
-- Alan Moore

#Whim #Murderer

There's no such thing as quitting. Just sometimes there's a longer pause between relapses.
-- Alan Moore

#Quitting #Sometimes #Relapse

There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic.
-- Alan Moore

#Art #Believe #Writing

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

#Art #Book #Writing

All we ever see of stars are their old photographs.
-- Alan Moore

#Stars #Photograph

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.
-- Alan Moore

#Writing #Cutting #Long

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

#Years #Style #Fading Away

People shouldn't be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.
-- Alan Moore

#Government #People #Should

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

#Thinking #Magic #Culture

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.
-- Alan Moore

#Past #Finding Yourself #Emergencies

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

#Order #Lust #Desire

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

#Men #Thinking #People

It is not the job of artists to give the audience what the audience want. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artist. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need
-- Alan Moore

#Inspirational #Jobs #Artist

Everybody has their story to tell.
-- Alan Moore

#Stories

If I have to have a past, then I prefer it to be multiple choice.
-- Alan Moore

#Past #Choices #Multiple

The past can't hurt you anymore, not unless you let it.
-- Alan Moore

#Heartbroken #Hurt #Past

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

#Hate #Two #People

Authority, when first detecting chaos at its heels, will entertain the vilest schemes to save its orderly facade.
-- Alan Moore

#Firsts #Chaos #Authority

Knowledge, like air, is vital to life. Like air, no one should be denied it.
-- Alan Moore

#Air #Should

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.
-- Alan Moore

#Long #Patterns #Imagine

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.
-- Alan Moore

#War #Responsibility #Power

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

#Peace #War #Men

It does not do to rely too much on silent majorities, Evey, for silence is a fragile thing, one loud noise, and its gone. But the people are so cowed and disorganised. A few might take the opportunity to protest, but it'll just be a voice crying in the wilderness. Noise is relative to the silence preceding it. The more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap. Our masters have not heard the people's voice for generations, Evey and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.
-- Alan Moore

#Opportunity #Voice #People

Who imprisoned me here? Who keeps me here? Who can release me? Who's controlling and constraining my life except...me?
-- Alan Moore

#Release

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

#Sex #Philosophy #Dark

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.
-- Alan Moore

#Art #Differences #Magic

Happiness is the most insidious prison of all.
-- Alan Moore

#Prison #Insidious

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

#Reality #Doe #Looks

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

#Marketing #Phrases #Idiot

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

#Thinking #Republic #Outcomes

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

#Stupid #Hate #Thinking

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

#Cities #Dying #Foam

No. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise.
-- Alan Moore

#Faces #Compromise #Armageddon

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

#Men #Asking #Paradox

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.
-- Alan Moore

#Book #Dark #Different

Way back in the day, when I first started and had delusions of adequacy as a cartoonist, I would listen to music. When I switched to a career as a writer, I would try to listen to music, but if the songs had lyrics they would get in the way of the words I was trying to write. So I switched to listening to purely instrumental pieces.
-- Alan Moore

#Song #Writing #Careers

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

#Mother #Integrity #Selfish

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

#Ideas #Fabulous #Breathtaking

Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.
-- Alan Moore

#Ends

None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with YOU. You're locked up in here with ME.
-- Alan Moore

#Locked Up

American love — like coke in green glass bottles...they don't make it anymore.
-- Alan Moore

#Glasses #Bottles #Green

We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.
-- Alan Moore

#Puppets #Strings

We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.
-- Alan Moore

#Long #Heaven #Horror

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

#War #Men #World

Well, what do you expect? The Comedian is dead.
-- Alan Moore

#Comedian #Wells

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

#Liars #Self #Dust

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

#Hands #Wish #Earth

If light is outlawed, then only outlaws will be able to see where they're going.
-- Alan Moore

#Light #Able #Outlaw

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

#Coffee #Thinking #Worry

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

#Differences #Numbers #Life And Death

There's been a growing dissatisfaction and distrust with the conventional publishing industry, in that you tend to have a lot of formerly reputable imprints now owned by big conglomerates.
-- Alan Moore

#Growing #Bigs #Distrust

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

#Mind #Different #Body

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

#Numbers #Mind #Connections