Quotes from Alan Moore

Quitting my day job and starting my life as a writer was a tremendous risk. It was a fool's leap, a shot in the dark. But anything of any value in our lives, whether that be a career, a work of art, a relationship, will always start with such a leap. And in order to be able to make it you have to put aside the fear of failing and the desire of succeeding. (...) Because things that we do without lust of result are the purest actions that we shall ever take.

With your depth of field and curious soul, allowing something to evolve or to see meaning in playful accidents can make the difference between creating the same old thing, or something that is unique, valuable, lasting, beautiful.

One colour. One word. So many shades. The color of african skin, of shadow on snow, of a jay's throat, the color of saxophones at dusk, of orbiting police lights smeared across tenement windows, of a flame's intestines, of the faint tracery of veins visible beneath the ghost-flesh of her forearm's underside, of loneliness, of melancholy. The blues.

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.

Miracles. Events with astronomical odds of occurring like oxygen turning into gold. I've longed to witness such an event, and yet I neglect that in human coupling, millions upon millions of cells compete to create life for generation after generation until finally, your mother loves a man and out of that contradiction against unfathomable odds, it's you-only you-that emerged, to distill so specific a form from all that chaos. It's like turning air into gold. A miracle.

About From Hell) The idea was to do a documentary comic about a murder. I concluded that there was a way of approaching the [Ripper] murders in a completely different way. I changed the emphasis from 'whodunit' to 'what happened'. I'd seen advertisements for Douglas Adams' book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. A holistic detective? You wouldn't just have to solve the crime, you'd have to solve the entire world that that crime happened in. That was the twist that I needed.

If we loved Steve Aylett , really loved him in the way that he deserves, a selfless love that genuinely wanted nothing save his happiness and comfort, we'd lobotomise him.

Where comes this dullness in your eyes? How has your century numbed you so? Shall man be given marvels only when he is beyond all wonder?

Truly, life is hell and death's rough hand our only deliverance.

It seems as if from being a novelty nine-day wonder, the super-hero has become a part of American life. It's here to stay. For better, or for worse.

in life there were times when the entirely inappropriate was the only appropriate response. Perhaps

There's sex and death and human grime in monochrome for one thin dime, and at least all the trains run on time but they don't go anywhere.

Crazed with helplessness, I cursed God and wept, wondering if he wept also.

Academic stress-related pre-birth suicides

In my opinion, the existence of life is a highly overrated phenomenon.

The horror is this: In the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness. We are alone. There is nothing else.

Outside an ambulance begins to scream as if overwhelmed by the suffering it must forever carry in its belly.

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.

We're saints and sinners both, the lot of us, or else there's no saints and no sinners.

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

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.

man should be his own ideal and champion, however long it takes him to arrive there.

Poverty was timeless and you could depend upon it. It was never out of fashion.

V: You asked for Knowledge, Eve, and that is what I shall pass on to you. Knowledge, like air, is vital to life. Like air, no one should be denied it. Eve: Oh, V, come on. You've always kept thinks mysterious: yourself, this place, your plans...If knowledge is like air, you've been suffocating me. V: Not at all. I've been teaching you to breathe.