The roots of the word ‘anarchy’ are ‘an archos,’ ‘no leaders,’ which is not really about the kind of chaos that most people imagine when the word ‘anarchy’ is mentioned. I think that anarchy is, to the contrary, about taking personal responsibility for yourself.
Alan Moore
I think that we need mythology. We need a bedrock of story and legend in order to live our lives coherently.
Alan Moore
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
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.
Alan Moore
If you give me a typewriter and I’m having a good day, I can write a scene that will astonish its readers. That will perhaps make them laugh, perhaps make them cry – that will have some emotional clout to it. It doesn’t cost much to do that.
Alan Moore
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.
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
Most of the people who get sent to die in wars are young men who’ve got a lot of energy and would probably rather, in a better world, be putting that energy into copulation rather than going over there and blowing some other young man’s guts out.
Alan Moore
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.
Alan Moore
Technology is always a two-edged sword. It will bring in many benefits, but also many disasters.
Alan Moore
Technology is always a two-edged sword. It will bring in many benefits, but also many disasters.
Alan Moore
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
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
To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate – unlike most films.
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
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
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.
Alan Moore
If the audience knew what they wanted then they wouldn’t be the audience, they would be the artist.
Alan Moore
If you’re functional, it doesn’t matter if you’re mad.
Alan Moore
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.
Alan Moore
Don’t leave home without your sword – your intellect.
Alan Moore
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.
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
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
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.
Alan Moore
There are two worlds we live in: a material world, bound by the laws of physics, and the world inside our mind, which is just as important.
Alan Moore
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
Writing is a very focused form of meditation. Just as good as sitting in a lotus position.
Alan Moore
I’ve never studied anything formally. I was excluded from school at the age of 17, so I am an autodidact, which is a word that I have taught myself.
Alan Moore
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
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
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.
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
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.
Alan Moore
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.
Alan Moore
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.
Alan Moore
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.
Alan Moore
There’s a widespread cultural barrenness across art and political culture. But there are some pockets of resistance on the extreme margins, like the techno-savvy protest movements, small press, the creator-owned comics, that seem to be getting some signs of hope for the future.
Alan Moore
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.
Alan Moore
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.
Alan Moore
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
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
Language comes first. It’s not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven’t got language, you can’t be conscious.
Alan Moore
Of course, Marxism is an example of what Carl Popper would have called a ‘World Three’ structure, in that it’s got immense power as an idea, but you couldn’t actually hold up anything in the world and say: ‘this is Marxism’.
Alan Moore
To some degree Satanism is purely a kind of disease of Christianity. You’ve got to really be Christian to believe in Satan.
Alan Moore
War is a perversion of sex.
Alan Moore
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.
Alan Moore
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.
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
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
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?
Alan Moore
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
I don’t really think that very much is interesting about the superhero as an archetype.
Alan Moore