Quotes from Alan Moore

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.'

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

To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate - unlike most films.

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.

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.

I think that we need mythology. We need a bedrock of story and legend in order to live our lives coherently.

Money's fine if it enables you to enjoy your life and to be useful to other people. But as something that is a means to an end, no, it's useless.

It's only those exceptional and rare individuals who have brilliant ideas delivered to them by the muse, complete and gift wrapped. The rest of us have to work at it.

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.

While the revolution will be certainly televised, it strikes me that there is a strong possibility that the revolution will also be crowd-funded.

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

No. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise.

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

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

The more I look at most of the art movements, it's all occultism, when you get down to it. The Surrealists were openly talking about being magicians.

As I see it, part of the art of being a hero is knowing when you don't need to be one anymore.

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.

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.

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.

I don't like to go to conventions, and I don't like to relate to people on a level of hero worship, because there's no real communication going on there.

I think that in an increasingly virtual world, lovingly produced artefacts are at a premium.

I'm the king of the 20th century. I'm the boogeyman, the villian, the black sheep of the family.