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.”

“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.”

“How can two people hate so much without knowing each other?”

“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.”

“I don't think any of us grew up into the world we were hoping for or expecting.”

“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'.”

“It wasn't so much all the sex that robbed me of my moral bearings, but all the narcotics. I must say, there's something about opium that goes very well with lesbianism.”

“And I'm thinking about the old man. He'll be pounding on the glass right about now... or maybe not now. Maybe in a while. But he'll be pounding and... will there be blood? I like to imagine so. Yes, I rather think there will be blood. Lots of blood. Blood in extraordinary quantities.”

“I love films that are made with almost no budget.”

“People have asked me why I made the first chapter of my first novel so long, and in an invented English. The only answer I can come up with that satisfies me is, 'To keep out the scum.'”

“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 still can't believe it . . . him comin' here everyday, nobody realizin'. Still, that's life: lotta stuff happens under the waterline.”

“I'm dependent on writing for a living, so really it's to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you're going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality.”

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? - Who watches the watchmen?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Evening work is economical. Power comes most cheaply by night.”

“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.”