Alan Moore Quotes

Alan Moore does have a sheen of class. He's a smart guy, and I'm sure there was a metaphoric level, I'm not denying that, but let's face it. the main reason he was doing a super-hero comic was because he was working for a super-hero comic book company. ~ Chester Brown

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

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

By connecting to nowhere you must in turn connect to everywhere, in the course of which becoming wise. Nothing is permanent, but anything is possible. Everything dies, yet beauty and joy endure. We are incredibly powerful and infinitely weak. Again and again these paradoxes repeat, like colors of yarn in an elaborate woven rug. There ~ Alan Moore

They say that life's a game, & then they take the board away. ~ 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. ~ Alan Moore

War is a perversion of sex. ~ Alan Moore

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

If you wear black, then kindly, irritating strangers will touch your arm consolingly and inform you that the world keeps on turning.

They're right. It does.

However much you beg it to stop.

It turns and lets grenadine spill over the horizon, sends hard bars of gold through my window and I wake up and feel happy for three seconds and then I remember.

It turns and tips people out of their beds and into their cars, their offices, an avalanche of tiny men and women tumbling through life...

All trying not to think about what's waiting at the bottom.

Sometimes it turns and sends us reeling into each other's arms. We cling tight, excited and laughing, strangers thrown together on a moving funhouse floor.

Intoxicated by the motion we forget all the risks.

And then the world turns...

And somebody falls off...

And oh God it's such a long way down.

Numb with shock, we can only stand and watch as they fall away from us, gradually getting smaller...

Receding in our memories until they're no longer visible.

We gather in cemeteries, tense and silent as if for listening for the impact; the splash of a pebble dropped into a dark well, trying to measure its depth.

Trying to measure how far we have to fall.

No impact comes; no splash. The moment passes. The world turns and we turn away, getting on with our lives...

Wrappi ~ Alan Moore

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

I always wanted to be a writer, but Alan Moore's work and help inspired me to write comics. In some ways the biggest influence on me writing was Punk. There was the idea that you could do something by simply doing it. ~ Neil Gaiman

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. ~ Alan Moore

There is a face beneath this mask, but it isn't me. I'm no more that face than I am the muscles beneath it, or the bones beneath that. ~ Steve Moore

Rorshach's journal. October 16, 1985. Been waiting in Moloch's fridge for three hours. Ate two raw eggs and packet of honey mustard sauce. Just realized I am sitting on baking soda. Freezing ass off. Really have to take leak. ~ Alan Moore

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. ~ Alan Moore

The world's a stage, & everything else is Vaudeville. ~ Alan Moore

I've come to think that the universe is a four-dimensional site in which nothing is changing and nothing is moving. The only thing that is moving along the time axis is our consciousness. The past is still there, the future has always been here. Every moment that has existed or will ever exist is all part of this giant hyper-moment of space-time. ~ Alan Moore

You have waged bitter and undeclared war upon the green, gutting the rain forests, mile after mile, day after day, but know this: the war has come home! It is man's turn to embrace the scythe. ~ Alan Moore

Memories can be vile. Repulsive little brutes, like children I suppose. But can we live without them? Memories are what our reason is based upon. If we can't face them, we deny reason itself! Although, why not? We aren't contractually tied down to rationality. There is no sanity clause. So when you find yourself locked down in an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember: There's always madness. You can just step outside and close the door, and all those dreadful things that happened, you can lock them away. Madness ... is an emergency exit. ~ Alan Moore

There never was a Jack the Ripper. Mary Kelly was just an unusually determined suicide. Why don't we leave it there. ~ Alan Moore

I shall tell you where we are. We're in the most extreme and utter region of the human mind. A dim, subconscious underworld. A radiant abyss where men meet themselves. Hell, Netley. We're in Hell. ~ Alan Moore

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

I first became an Alan Moore fan in Covent Garden on a Saturday afternoon in 1987, when I bought a copy of 'Watchmen,' his graphic novel about ageing superheroes and nuclear apocalypse. ~ Susanna Clarke

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

Noise is relative to the silence preceding it. The more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap. ~ Alan Moore

The most probable of all my theorems, is that life is ordered by the principles of some religion so peculiar and obscure it has no followers, and none may fathom it, nor know the rituals by which to court its favour. ~ Alan Moore

Art makes us feel less alone. It makes us think: somebody else has thought this, somebody else has had these feelings. ~ Alan Moore

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. ~ Alan Moore

LSD was an incredible experience. Not that I'm recommending it for anybody else; but for me it kind of – it hammered home to me that reality was not a fixed thing. That the reality that we saw about us every day was one reality, and a valid one – but that there were others, different perspectives where different things have meaning that were just as valid. That had a profound effect on me. ~ Alan Moore

In 1965, worked with Nite Owl bringing street gangs under control. Tackled the Big Figure together. Brought down Underboss together. Good team.
Until he got soft, like rest. Until he quit.
No staying power. None of them. Except Comedian. Met him in 1966. Forceful personality. Didn't care if people liked him. Uncompromising. Admired that.
Of us all, he understood most. About world. About people. About society and what's happening to it.
Things everyone knows in gut. Things everyone too scared to face, too polite to talk about. He understood.
Understood man's capacity for horrors and never quit. Saw the world's black underbelly and never surrendered. Once man has seen, he can never turn his back on it. Never pretend it doesn't exist.
No matter who orders him to look the other way.
We do not do this thing because it is permitted. We do it because we have to.
We do it because we are compelled. ~ Alan Moore

Stood in firelight, sweltering. Bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night.

Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else.

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. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.

Was Rorschach.

Does that answer your Questions, Doctor? ~ Alan Moore

Magic and art tend to share a lot of the same language. They both talk about evocation, invocation, and conjuring. ~ Alan Moore

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

It seems strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses, and apologized to no one. ~ Alan Moore

He would sooner live a life of endless blessing than one of dying curse, and after all, it was in how you chose to see things that the narrow border between Hell and Paradise was traced. ~ Alan Moore

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

inverted memories of this immediate revelation, memories that in some puzzling fashion one might have before their subject had occurred. The ~ Alan Moore

In our every cell, furled at the nucleus, there is a ribbon two yards long and just ten atoms wide. Over a hundred million miles of DNA in very human individual, enough to wrap five million times around our world and make the Midgard serpent blush for shame, make even the Ourobouros worm swallow hard in disbelief. This snake-god, nucleotide, twice twisted, scaled in adenine and cytosine, in thymine and in guanine, is a one-man show, will be the actors, props and setting, be the apple and the garden both. The player bides his time, awaits his entrance to a drum-roll of igniting binaries. This is the only dance in town, this anaconda tango, this slow spiral up through time from witless dirt to paramecium, from blind mechanic organism to awareness. There, below the birthing stars, Life sways and improvises. Every poignant gesture drips with slapstick; pathos; an unbearably affecting bravery. To dare this stage, this huge and overwhelming venue. Squinting through the stellar footlights, hoping there's an audience, that there's someone out there, but dancing anyway. But dancing anyway. ~ Alan Moore

You must understand that knowledge is not all your heritage. I includes also courage and belief, like hers that we commemorate herein ... and romance. Always, always romance. ~ Alan Moore

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

Labour at your work until people cannot imagine what you have designed existing any other way. ~ Alan Moore

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. ~ Alan Moore

Design is based upon resolving how someone is going to use something. Great design is describing the very best experience for them, then moving towards that ideal. ~ Alan Moore

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. ~ Alan Moore

Evening work is economical. Power comes most cheaply by night. ~ Alan Moore

It's not easy to convey to someone who doesn't read comics just how Alan Moore has dominated the field since 'Watchmen.' ~ Susanna Clarke

Much of magic as I understand it in the Western occult tradition is the search for the Self, with a capital S. This is understood as being the Great Work, as being the gold the alchemists sought, as being the Will, the Soul, the thing we have inside us that is behind the intellect, the body, the dreams. The inner dynamo of us, if you like. Now this is the single most important thing that we can ever attain, the knowledge of our own Self. And yet there are a frightening amount of people who seem to have the urge not just to ignore the Self, but actually seem to have the urge to obliterate themselves. This is horrific, but you can almost understand the desire to simply wipe out that awareness, because it's too much of a responsibility to actually posses such a thing as a soul, such a precious thing. What if you break it? What if you lose it? Mightn't it be best to anesthetize it, to deaden it, to destroy it, to not have to live with the pain of struggling towards it and trying to keep it pure? I think that the way that people immerse themselves in alcohol, in drugs, in television, in any of the addictions that our culture throws up, can be seen as a deliberate attempt to destroy any connection between themselves and the responsibility of accepting and owning a higher Self and then having to maintain it. ~ Alan Moore

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. ~ Alan Moore

[...] That's Beethoven's fifth...
Da da da dum!
Heh heh. That's morse code, y'know.
Uh, morse code?
Hmm. It's morse code for the letter "v". ~ Alan Moore

...She wasn't anyone special. She wasn't that brave, that clever or that strong. She was just somebody that felt cramped by the confines of her life. She was just somebody who had to get out. And she did it! She went out past Vega, out past Moulquet and Lambard! She saw places that aren't even there anymore! And do you know what she said? Her most famous quotation? "Anybody could have done it ~ Alan Moore

He plans to use every low-down technique he knows to loosen up the suspect, everything from good cop/bad cop to a four-pound bag of oranges that damage the internal organs but don't leave a mark upon the skin. Or, failing that, he'll Google him. Sure ~ Alan Moore

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

I can't move. My mind's like a dance hall fire, a crowd of terrified voices all screaming instructions at once. ~ Alan Moore

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. ~ Alan Moore

I live my life free of compromise, and step into the shadows without complaint or regret. ~ Alan Moore

The original series of Watchmen is the complete story that Alan Moore and I wanted to tell. However, I appreciate DC's reasons for this initiative and the wish of the artists and writers involved to pay tribute to our work. May these new additions have the success they desire. ~ Dave Gibbons

I have so very much. I have so very little. ~ Alan Moore

Behind gods, ghosts, and people squats the state, which asserts total access to both public and private space: the ~ Alan Moore

I find it difficult sometimes to read exploration as other than a euphemism for empire and exploitation. The ~ Alan Moore

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. ~ Alan Moore

Writing from the perspective of women survivors of violence, Moore is at his most appealing; though his writing about sex and brutality can verge on the exploitative, he sometimes reveals an unexpected sympathy with dominated women. ~ Zoe Brigley

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

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

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. ~ Alan Moore

Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different! ~ Alan Moore

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

I'm the one who started spreading that particular factoid, about Bendis, Azz and me all being bald Brian's from Cleveland, just to get my name mentioned in the same sentence as two much-better writers, and it's worked like a goddamn charm. Next up, I'm going to grow a big, disgusting beard, just so people will start talking about Alan Moore and me in the same breath. ~ Brian K. Vaughan

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. ~ Alan Moore

402Emotional position is part of it, but as an individual you are not your emotions, neither are you your intellect. These are things that you have . They're not things that you are . Therefore you have to start to become aware of the different requirements that human beings have, the different areas that they like to be satisfied in. Which means becoming aware of yourself. I mean, as a writer you're gonna have to understand pretty much the whole universe. But the best place to start is by understanding the inner universe. The entire universe – for one thing – only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality. So. To understand the universe there's worse advice than that which was carved above the shrine of the Delphi oracle. Where it just said: "Know thyself". Understand yourself. Know thyself is a magical goal, but like I say to me there is very little difference between magic and creative art in any sense – the laws of one apply perfectly well to the other. ~ Alan Moore

Most people find the word Apocalypse, to be a terrifying concept. Checked in the dictionary, it means only revelation, although it obviously has also come to mean end of the world. As to what the end of the world means, I would say that probably depends on what we mean by world. I don't think this means the planet, or even the life forms upon the planet. I think the world is purely a construction of ideas, and not just the physical structures, but the mental structures, the ideologies that we've erected, that is what I would call the world. Our political structures, philosophical structures, ideological frameworks, economies. These are actually imaginary things, and yet that is the framework that we have built our entire world upon. It strikes me that a strong enough wave of information could completely overturn and destroy all of that. A sudden realization that would change our entire perspective upon who we are and how we exist. ~ Alan Moore

In this world, you shouldn't rely on help from anybody. In the end, a man stands alone. ~ Alan Moore

My dear, beautiful and imaginative things can be destroyed. Beauty and imagination cannot. ~ Alan Moore

If you would know my path and follow in its way, then know the land about, both track and willage, in its bridge and in its drownings. Know the outcast rat-shacks, relic stones and gill-halls. Mark each path above and know the underpath below, its secret way from vault to treasure hole.' My ~ Alan Moore

I'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 Moore

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. ~ Alan Moore

Love. His love for Cathy and the kids. That had been one of his protective mantras, he was certain, except love just made things crueller, gave you so much more to lose. ~ Alan Moore

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

Here's a list of some of the folks who have written Swamp Thing over the years: Alan Moore, Len Wein, Scott Snyder, Brian K Vaughan, Joshua Dysart, Rick Veitch, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar. That's not even a full list, but you see my point - ol' Swampy has had some seriously brilliant people behind the keyboard in his time. ~ Charles Soule

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

Alan Moore is a prophetic writer. ~ Gerard Way

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

Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world. ~ Alan Moore

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Everything's possible
Nothing is true. ~ Alan Moore

Madness is the emergency exit. You can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. You can lock them away ... forever.
The Joker ~ Alan Moore

It was as if life was one great big impersonal piece of machinery. ~ Alan Moore

They claim their labours are to build a heaven yet their heaven is populated with horrors. Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. A clock without a craftsman. It's too late. Always has been, always will be ... too late. ~ Alan Moore

Judged 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 Moore

THE WICKED + THE DIVINE is unlike True Detective as: it features women who do things. THE WICKED + THE DIVINE is like True Detective as: we shamelessly rip off huge chunks of stuff from Alan Moore. ~ Kieron Gillen

You see, there's the way things seemed and then there's the way things were and one is so often the total reverse of the other. ~ Alan Moore

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. ~ Alan Moore

How can two people hate so much without knowing each other? ~ Alan Moore

I am not man so much as syndrome; as a voice that bellows in the human heart.
I am rain.
I cannot be contained ~ Alan Moore

Voila! In view humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the "vox populi" now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin, van guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous.
Verily this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honour to meet you and you may call me V. ~ Alan Moore

machine. Unexpectedly, I'd invented a time ~ Alan Moore

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 thermo-dynamic miracle. ~ Alan Moore

Now everything is wonderful and hazardous and nothing's hypothetical. ~ Alan Moore

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. ~ Alan Moore

Who watches the watchmen? ~ Alan Moore

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

God is in the rain. ~ Alan Moore