Alan Moore

I find that if I'm watching somebody upon television or in a movie that is on a window ledge or in some high precarious position my hand starts sweating and I get that crawling feeling in the soles of my feet.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

If you're functional, it doesn't matter if you're mad.

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.

I love films that are made with almost no budget.

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.

Writing is a very focused form of meditation. Just as good as sitting in a lotus position.

In comics the reader is in complete control of the experience. They can read it at their own pace, and if there's a piece of dialogue that seems to echo something a few pages back, they can flip back and check it out, whereas the audience for a film is being dragged through the experience at the speed of 24 frames per second.

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.

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'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.

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

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 try to do things in comics that cannot be repeated by television, by movies, by interactive entertainment.

It may be true that the only reason the comic book industry now exists is for this purpose, to create characters for movies, board games and other types of merchandise.

Magic is a state of mind. It is often portrayed as very black and gothic, and that is because certain practitioners played that up for a sense of power and prestige. That is a disservice. Magic is very colorful. Of this, I am sure.

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.

If 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.

It's not my job to tell people what to think. If I can actually in some way help the readers' own creative thinking, then that's got to be to everybody's benefit.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I didn't really sign up to be a celebrity, I only signed up to be a writer.

I could never be the kind of writer who went to the set of the movie and fussed and fretted about, 'Oh, that dialogue's wrong,' or 'That character doesn't look like that.' That would be insufferable.

On the one occasion where I did try writing a screenplay, I found the rewriting just unendurable.

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.

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

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.

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.

All culture must have arisen from cult.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'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.

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.

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.