Background Image

...

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

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Every Film Is A

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.

Views: 9

Topic

More From Alan Moore

Technology Is Always A Two-edged Sword. It Will Bring In Many Benefits, But Also Many Disasters.

My Main Point About Films Is That I Don't Like The Adaptation Process, And I Particularly Don't Like The Modern Way Of Comic Book-film Adaptations, Where, Essentially, The Central Characters Are Just Franchises That Can Be Worked Endlessly To No Apparent Point.

Material Existence Is Entirely Founded On A Phantom Realm Of Mind, Whose Nature And Geography Are Unexplored.

I Leave The Human Cockroaches To Discuss Their Heroin And Child Pornography.

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.

The Conservative Party Is A Religion In That They Are Bound Together By Belief. Almost Any Organization Has Its Religious Aspects.

Language Comes First. It's Not That Language Grows Out Of Consciousness, If You Haven't Got Language, You Can't Be Conscious.

It Doesn't Do You Any Service To Demonize Any Group Of People. It's Much Better To Try And Understand From The Inside.

On The One Occasion Where I Did Try Writing A Screenplay, I Found The Rewriting Just Unendurable.

Nothing Is Insoluble. Nothing Is Hopeless. Not While There's Life.

A Lot Of People Have Found The Idea Of Living Your Life Over And Over Again Absolutely Terrifying; There's Some People That Find It Very Comforting. There Are Others That Are Appalled By It.

Knowledge, Like Air, Is Vital To Life. Like Air, No One Should Be Denied It.

You Wear A Mask For So Long, You Forget Who You Were Beneath It.

I Don't Think Any Of Us Grew Up Into The World We Were Hoping For Or Expecting.

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 Suppose That The Main Drive Is To Find The Edge Of Something And Then Throw Myself Over It.

I Think That We Need Mythology. We Need A Bedrock Of Story And Legend In Order To Live Our Lives Coherently.

People Shouldn't Be Afraid Of Their Government. Governments Should Be Afraid Of Their People.

Anarchy Wears Two Faces, Both Creator And Destroyer. Thus Destroyers Topple Empires; Make A Canvas Of Clean Rubble Where Creators Can Then Build A Better World. Rubble, Once Achieved Makes Further Ruins' Means Irrelevant. Away With Our Explosives, Then! Away With Our Destroyers! They Have No Place Within Our Better World. But Let Us Raise A Toast To All Our Bombers, All Our Bastards, Most Unlovely And Most Unforgivable, Let's Drink Their Health, Then Meet With Them No More.

As I See It, A Successful Story Of Any Kind Should Be Almost Like Hypnosis: You Fascinate The Reader With Your First Sentence, Draw Them In Further With Your Second Sentence And Have Them In A Mild Trance By The Third. Then, Being Careful Not To Wake Them, You Carry Them Away Up The Back Alley Of Your Narrative And When They Are Hopelessly Lost Within The Story, Having Surrendered Themselves To It, You Do Them Terrible Violence With A Softball Bag And Then Lead Them Whimpering To The Exit On The Last Page. Believe Me, They'll Thank You For It.

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.

The Announcement That There Is A League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen Television Series Hasn't Caused Me To Drastically Alter My Opinions. Now It Seems They Are Recycling Things That Have Already Proven Not To Work.

I Despise The Comic Industry, But I Will Always Love The Comic Medium.

Your Pretty Empire Took So Long To Build, Now, With A Snap Of History's Fingers, Down It Goes.

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.

Memory's So Treacherous. One Moment You're Lost In A Carnival Of Delights With Poignant Childhood Aromas, The Flashing Neon On Puberty, All That Sentimental Candyfloss. The Next, It Leads You Somewhere You Don't Want To Go.. Somewhere Dark And Cold, Filled With The Damp Ambiguous Shapes Of Things You'd Hoped Were Forgotten.

I'm 65 Years Old. Everyday The Future Looks A Little Bit Darker. But The Past, Even The Grimy Parts Of It, Well, It Just Keeps On Getting Brighter All The Time.

Sexually Progressive Cultures Gave Us Literature, Philosophy, Civilization And The Rest, While Sexually Restrictive Cultures Gave Us The Dark Ages And The Holocaust.

How Can Two People Hate So Much Without Knowing Each Other?

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.

There Has Been A Rather Unpleasant Sensibility Apparent In Frank Miller's Work For Quite A Long Time.

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.

In The Human Mind, The Number Of Possible Connections That Can Be Made Between Neurons Greatly Exceeds The Number Of Atoms In The Universe.

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.

Our Consciousness, A Startling Outgrowth Of The Universe, Is Possibly Its Most Important Part, The Fraction Of Existence That Can Think, Feel, Marvel At Itself.

Please Don't Worry. It's A Psychological Complaint, Common Amongst Ex-librarians. You See, She Thinks She's A Coffee Table Edition.

When The Persecution Of An Individual Who Has Exposed An Evil Is Pursued So Ruthlessly And Yet The Evil Itself Is Studiedly Ignored, All Of Us Know That There Is Something Very Wrong With The Way That Our Society Is Conducting Itself. And If We Do Not Protest In The Strongest Terms About What Is Being Done In Our Name, Then We Become Complicit.

There... Poor Little Things. You See Them? Standing With Their Numbers On Their Blank, Indifferent Faces, Nuremberg In Miniature, The Ranks Of Painted Wooden Men... Poor Dominoes. Your Pretty Empire Took So Long To Build, Now, With A Snap Of History's Fingers Down It Goes.

There Is Some Confusion As To What Magic Actually Is. I Think This Can Be Cleared Up If You Just Look At The Very Earliest Descriptions Of Magic. Magic In Its Earliest Form Is Often Referred To As “the Art”. I Believe This Is Completely Literal. I Believe That Magic Is Art And That Art, Whether It Be Writing, Music, Sculpture, Or Any Other Form Is Literally Magic.

It Does Not Do To Rely Too Much On Silent Majorities, Evey, For Silence Is A Fragile Thing, One Loud Noise, And Its Gone. But The People Are So Cowed And Disorganised. A Few Might Take The Opportunity To Protest, But It'll Just Be A Voice Crying In The Wilderness. Noise Is Relative To The Silence Preceding It. The More Absolute The Hush, The More Shocking The Thunderclap. Our Masters Have Not Heard The People's Voice For Generations, Evey And It Is Much, Much Louder Than They Care To Remember.

There's No Such Thing As Quitting. Just Sometimes There's A Longer Pause Between Relapses.

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.

It's Funny, But Certain Faces Seem To Go In And Out Of Style. You Look At Old Photographs And Everybody Has A Certain Look To Them, Almost As If They're Related. Look At Pictures From Ten Years Later And You Can See That There's A New Kind Of Face Starting To Predominate, And That The Old Faces Are Fading Away And Vanishing, Never To Be Seen Again.

I'm Very Pessimistic About Adaptations From One Medium To Another. I've Got A Very Kind Of Primitive, Puritan View Of It. I Tend To Think That If Something Was Derived For One Medium, Then There's No Real Immediate Reason To Think That It's Necessarily Going To Be As Good Or Better If Adapted Into Another One. There Have Been Very Good Stage Plays That Have Made Some Very Good Films. But There Are Not So Many Differences Between The Theater And The Cinema As There Are Between The Cinema And, Say, Reading A Book Or Reading A Comic.

It's Pretty Much A Fact That Our Entire Universe Is A Mental Construct. We Don't Actually Deal With Reality Directly. We Simply Compose A Picture Of Reality From What's Going On In Our Retinas, In The Timpani Of Our Ears, And In Our Nerve Endings.

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.

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.

To Paint Comic Books As Childish And Illiterate Is Lazy. A Lot Of Comic Books Are Very Literate - Unlike Most Films.

I Sat On The Bed. I Looked At The Rorschach Blot. I Tried To Make It Look Like A Spreading Tree, Shadows Pooled Beneath It, But It Didn't. It Looked More Like A Dead Cat I Once Found, The Fat, Glistening Grubs Writhing Blindly, Squirming Over Each Other, Frantically Tunneling Away From The Light. But Even That Isn't The Real Horror. The Horror Is This: In The End, It Is Simply A Picture Of Empty Meaningless Blackness.

I Didn't Put You In A Prison, Evey. I Just Showed You The Bars.

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.

I'm Remote From Most Technology To The Point That I'm Kind Of Amish.

The Things We Do Without The Fear Of Failure And The Desire For Success Are The Purest Acts We'll Ever Do

Desire For Success

Fear Of Failure

There Are People. There Are Stories. The People Think They Shape The Stories, But The Reverse If Often Closer To The Truth. Stories Shape The World. They Exist Independently Of People, And In Places Quite Devoid Of Man, There May Yet Be Mythologies.

I Think I'm A Bit Like A Kind Of Shark, That If I Stop Swimming, I Won't Be Able To Breathe, Something Like That.

I Genuinely Like The People I Meet At Signings Or The Bits Of Public Talking That I Do.

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.

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.

None Of You Understand. I'm Not Locked Up In Here With You. You're Locked Up In Here With Me.

My Experience Of Life Is That It Is Not Divided Up Into Genres; It’s A Horrifying, Romantic, Tragic, Comical, Science-fiction Cowboy Detective Novel. You Know, With A Bit Of Pornography If You're Lucky.

Rather Than Being Able To Have A Healthy Relationship With Our Own Sexual Imagination, We're Driven Into Some Dark Corners By Shame And Embarrassment And Guilt, And Those Dark Corners Breed All Sorts Of Monsters.

The Past Can't Hurt You Anymore. Not Unless You Let It. They Made You Into A Victim, Evey. They Made You Into A Statistic. But, That's Not The Real You. That's Not Who You Are Inside.

The Only Reality We Can Ever Truly Know Is That Of Our Perceptions, Our Own Consciousness, While That Consciousness, And Thus Our Entire Reality, Is Made Of Nothing But Signs And Symbols. Nothing But Language. Even God Requires Language Before Conceiving The Universe. See Genesis: “in The Beginning Was The Word.

Things Are Tough All Over, Cupcake, An' It Rains On The Just An' The Unjust Alike...except In California.

Well, What Do You Expect? The Comedian Is Dead.

The Here-and-now Demands Attention, Is More Present To Us. We Dismiss The Inner World Of Our Ideas As Less Important, Although Most Of Our Immediate Physical Reality Originated Only In The Mind. The Tv, Sofa, Clock And Room, The Whole Civilisation That Contains Them Once Were Nothing Save Ideas.

Life Isn't Divided Into Genres

The Magician To Some Degree Is Trying To Drive Him Or Herself Mad In A Controlled Setting, Within Controlled Laws.

Do I Believe, For Example, That By Using Magic I Could Fly? No. How Would You Get Around Gravity? Impossible. Do I Believe That I Might Be Able To Project My Consciousness Into A Very, Very Vivid Simulation Of Flying? Yeah. Yes, I've Done That. Yes, That Works.

Everything You've Ever Read Of Mine Is First-draft. This Is One Of The Peculiarities Of The Comics Field. By The Time You're Working On Chapter Three Of Your Masterwork, Chapter One Is Already In Print. You Can't Go Back And Suddenly Decide To Make This Character A Woman, Or Have This One Fall Out Of A Window.

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.

It's All A Joke! Everything Anybody Ever Valued Or Struggled For... It's All A Monstrous, Demented Gag! So Why Can't You See The Funny Side? Why Aren't You Laughing?

Love Doesn't Have A Point. Love Is The Point.

I've Always Wanted To Explore Characters Of All Races, All Genders, All Ages. It Just Seems To Me To Be A Natural Way To Approach Any Kind Of Storytelling.

Real Life Is Messy, Inconsistent, And It's Seldom When Anything Ever Really Gets Resolved. It's Taken Me A Long Time To Realize That.

I've Had Years Of Bizarre Hallucinogenic Magical Experiences In Which I Believed I Had Communicated With Entities That May Well Have Been Disassociated Parts Of My Own Personality Or Conceivably Some Independent Entity Of A Metaphysical Nature. Both Would Seem Equally Interesting.

If You're Going To Have Any Kind Of Political Opposition In The 21st Century, Then It Has To Be As Fundamentally Liquid As The Rapidly Changing Society We're Living In.

I Am Not Saying People Should Not Be Free To Join Whichever Reason They Choose But Should We Be Forced To Live Our Lives Around A Belief System That Originated Somewhere Around The Fourth Or Fifth Century Bc. I Cannot See Any More Reason To Base A Belief System Around Christianity, Judaism Or Islam Than I Can Around Lord Of The Rings.

It's Early Days. A Few Skeletons Are Bound To Keep Jumping Out Of The Closet.

It Is Not The Job Of Artists To Give The Audience What The Audience Want. If The Audience Knew What They Needed, Then They Wouldn’t Be The Audience. They Would Be The Artist. It Is The Job Of Artists To Give The Audience What They Need

The Main Thing That I Learned About Conspiracy Theory, Is That Conspiracy Theorists Believe In A Conspiracy Because That Is More Comforting. The Truth Of The World Is That It Is Actually Chaotic. The Truth Is That It Is Not The Iluminati, Or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, Or The Gray Alien Theory. The Truth Is Far More Frightening - Nobody Is In Control. The World Is Rudderless.

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 Thermodynamic Miracle.

Since Mankind's Dawn, A Handful Of Oppressors Have Accepted The Responsibility Over Our Lives That We Should Have Accepted For Ourselves. By Doing So, They Took Our Power. By Doing Nothing, We Gave It Away. We've Seen Where Their Way Leads, Through Camps And Wars, Towards The Slaughterhouse.

Nothing Ends, Adrian. Nothing Ever Ends.

While A Truncheon May Be Used In Lieu Of Conversation, Words Will Always Retain Their Power.

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.

The Cold, Suffocating Dark Goes On Forever And We Are Alone. Live Our Lives, Lacking Anything Better To Do. Devise Reason Later.

Perhaps This Is The Purpose Of All Art, All Writing, On The Murders, Fiction And Non-fiction: Simply To Participate.

Remember, Remember The Fifth Of November Of Gunpowder Treason And Plot. I Know Of No Reason Why The Gun Powder Treason Should Ever Be Forgot.

The Ending Is Nearer Than You Think, And It Is Already Written. All That We Have Left To Choose Is The Correct Moment To Begin.

They Say We Have We Created The Man To End All Wars; I Say We Have Created A Man To End All Worlds.

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.

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.

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.

Magic And Art Tend To Share A Lot Of The Same Language. They Both Talk About Evocation, Invocation, And Conjuring.

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.

There's Been A Growing Dissatisfaction And Distrust With The Conventional Publishing Industry, In That You Tend To Have A Lot Of Formerly Reputable Imprints Now Owned By Big Conglomerates.

We Gaze Continually At The World And It Grows Dull In Our Perceptions. Yet Seen From Another's Vantage Point, As If New, It May Still Take The Breath Away.

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.

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'.

This City Is Dying Of Rabies. Is The Best I Can Do To Wipe Random Flecks Of Foam From Its Lips?

I'm Very Distanced From The Comics Industry. I Love The Comics Medium, But I Have No Time For The Industry.

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.

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.

We Have Laboured Long To Build A Heaven, Only To Find It Populated With Horrors.

Famously, There's Not Really Anywhere To Go After Nihilism. It's Not Progressing Toward Anything, It's A Statement Of Outrage, However Brilliant.

The Superman Exists And He's American.

It Is The Oldest Ironies That Are Still The Most Satisfying: Man, When Preparing For Bloody War, Will Orate Loudly And Most Eloquently In The Name Of Peace.

To Some Degree Satanism Is Purely A Kind Of Disease Of Christianity. You've Got To Really Be Christian To Believe In Satan.

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.

Why Do We Argue? Life's So Fragile, A Successful Virus Clinging To A Speck Of Mud, Suspended In Endless Nothing.

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.

Who? Who Is But The Form Following The Function Of What, And What I Am Is A Man In A Mask.

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.

On My Fortieth Birthday, Rather Than Merely Bore My Friends By Having Anything As Mundane As A Midlife Crisis I Decided It Might Be More Interesting To Actually Terrify Them By Going Completely Mad And Declaring Myself To Be A Magician.

Ideas, Unlike Solid Structures, Do Not Perish. They Remain Immortal, Immaterial And Everywhere, Like All Divine Things. Ideas Are A Golden, Savage Landscape That We Wander Unaware, Without A Map. Be Careful: In The Last Analysis, Reality May Be Exactly What We Think It Is.

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.

When I Was Working Upon The Abc Books, I Wanted To Show Different Ways That Mainstream Comics Could Viably Have Gone, That They Didn't Have To Follow 'watchmen' And The Other 1980s Books Down This Relentlessly Dark Route. It Was Never My Intention To Start A Trend For Darkness. I'm Not A Particularly Dark Individual.

The Central Question Is, Is This Guy Right? Or Is He Mad? What Do You, The Reader, Think About This? Which Struck Me As A Properly Anarchist Solution. I Didn't Want To Tell People What To Think, I Just Wanted To Tell People To Think And Consider Some Of These Admittedly Extreme Little Elements, Which Nevertheless Do Recur Fairly Regularly Throughout Human History.

I Was Kind Of A Selfish Child, Who Always Wanted Things His Way, And I've Kind Of Taken That Over Into My Relationship With The World.

The Comics Medium Has Some Unusual Features That Do Make It Very Different, In That It's Combining A Verbal Narrative With A Visual One That Allows For Much Richer Possibilities Of Transmitting Information.

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.'

Everybody Has Their Story To Tell.

The One Place Gods Inarguably Exist Is In The Human Mind.

A World Grows Up Around Me. Am I Shaping It, Or Do Its Predetermined Contours Guide My Hand?

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.

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.

Bricks And Mortar

We're All Puppets, Laurie. I'm Just A Puppet Who Can See The Strings.

Dan, I'm Not A Republic Serial Villain. Do You Seriously Think I'd Explain My Master-stroke If There Remained The Slightest Chance Of You Affecting Its Outcome? I Did It Thirty-five Minutes Ago.

The Dusk Reeks Of Fornication And Bad Consciences.

If I Have To Have A Past, Then I Prefer It To Be Multiple Choice.

Multiple Choice

Who Imprisoned Me Here? Who Keeps Me Here? Who Can Release Me? Who's Controlling And Constraining My Life Except...me?

I Think That Storytelling And Creation Are Very Close To What The Center Of What Magic Is About. I Think Not Just For Me, But For Most Of The Cultures That Have Had A Concept Of Magic, Then The Manipulation Of Language, And Words, And Thus Of Stories And Fictions, Has Been Very Close To The Center Of It All.

In An Era Of Stress And Anxiety, When The Present Seems Unstable And The Future Unlikely, The Natural Response Is To Retreat And Withdraw From Reality, Taking Recourse Either In Fantasies Of The Future Or In Modified Visions Of A Half-imagined Past.

There's Always Been This Feedback Between Comics And Films. But I Think That If You Take That Analogy Too Far, If You Only See Comic Books In Terms Of Films, Then Eventually The Best We Can End Up With Is Films That Don't Move. It Would Make Us A Poor Relation To The Movie Industry.

I Love Films That Are Made With Almost No Budget.

All Culture Must Have Arisen From Cult.

To Me, All Creativity Is Magic. Ideas Start Out In The Empty Void Of Your Head - And They End Up As A Material Thing, Like A Book You Can Hold In Your Hand. That Is The Magical Process. It's An Alchemical Thing. Yes, We Do Get The Gold Out Of It But That's Not The Most Important Thing. It's The Work Itself.

The 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.

Roses Are Red Violets Are Blue Everything's Possible Nothing Is True.

So When You Find Yourself Locked Onto An Unpleasant Train Of Thought, Heading For The Places In Your Past Where The Screaming Is Unbearable, Remember There's Always Madness. Madness Is The Emergency Exit.

Train Of Thought

Finding Yourself

The Only Real Reason That I'd Have For Working For Hollywood Is The Fantastic Amounts Of Money Involved, And That Isn't Enough Of An Incentive To Really Give Up The Degree Of Control That I Have Over My Work At The Moment With Comics. I Suppose That's Probably Why I Don't Have Any Designs On Being A Screenwriter.

If You're Functional, It Doesn't Matter If You're Mad.

I Think That In An Increasingly Virtual World, Lovingly Produced Artefacts Are At A Premium.

I've No Objection To The Term 'graphic Novel,' As Long As What It Is Talking About Is Actually Some Sort Of Graphic Work That Could Conceivably Be Described As A Novel. My Main Objection To The Term Is That Usually It Means A Collection Of Six Issues Of Spider-man, Or Something That Does Not Have The Structure Or Any Of The Qualities Of A Novel, But Is Perhaps Roughly The Same Size.

No One Will Ever Forget That Night, And What It Meant For This Country. But I Will Never Forget The Man And What He Meant To Me.

In Order To Be Able To Make It, You Have To Put Aside The Fear Of Failing And The Desire Of Succeeding. You Have To Do These Things Completely And Purely Without Fear, Without Desire. Because Things That We Do Without Lust Of Result Are The Purest Actions We Shall Ever Take.

I Wouldn’t Be The Person I Am Today If It Wasn’t For The Opportunities The Library Gave Me.

A Lot Of The Critique Of Our Growing Mechanization Was Actually At Its Strongest, And Arguably At Its Most Perceptive, During The Late '60s.

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.

I Am But A Stranger ... As We All Are. Lonely Inside Our Separate Skins, We Cannot Know Each Others Pain And Must Bear Our Own In Solitude. For My Part, I Have Found That Walking Soothes It; And That, Given Luck, Sometimes We Find One To Walk Besides Us ... At Least For A Little Way.

I'm The King Of The 20th Century. I'm The Boogeyman, The Villian, The Black Sheep Of The Family.

London Has Been Used As The Emblematic English City, But It's Far From Representative Of What Life In England Is Actually About.

I Think If You Were To Sever The Connection Between Arousal And Shame, You Might Actually Come Up With Something Liberating And Socially Useful. It Might Be Healthier For Us, And Lead To A Situation Such As They Enjoy In Holland, Denmark, Or Spain, Where They Have Pornography All Over The Place - Quite Hardcore Pornography - But They Do Not Have Anywhere The Incidence Of Sex Crimes.

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.

Once You Realize What A Joke Everything Is, Being The Comedian Is The Only Thing That Makes Sense.

Despite The Constant Clamor For Attention From The Modern World, I Do Believe We Need To Procure A Psychological Space For Ourselves. I Apparently Know Some People Who Try To Achieve This By Logging Off Or Going Without Their Twitter Or Facebook For A Limited Period.

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.

Please, Don't Go. It's Lonely. There's A Hole In My Head As Big As The World And It's So Very Lonely.

I Enjoy Putting My Mind Into Different Situations Rather Than My Body.

Everybody Is Special. Everybody. Everybody Is A Hero, A Lover, A Fool, A Villain. Everybody. Everybody Has Their Story To Tell.

Blake Understood. Treated It Like A Joke, But He Understood. He Saw The Cracks In Society, Saw The Little Men In Masks Trying To Hold It Together...he Saw The True Face Of The Twentieth Century And Chose To Become A Reflection Of It, A Parody Of It. No One Else Saw The Joke. That's Why He Was Lonely.

Don't Leave Home Without Your Sword - Your Intellect.

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!

You Can’t Buy That Kind Of Empowerment. To Just Know That As Far As You Are Aware, You Have Not Got A Price; That There Is Not An Amount Of Money Large Enough To Make You Compromise Even A Tiny Bit Of Principle That, As It Turned Out, Would Make No Practical Difference Anyway. I’d Advise Everyone To Do It, Otherwise You’re Going To End Up Mastered By Money And That’s Not A Thing You Want Ruling Your Life.

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.

I Don’t Distinguish Between Magic And Art. When I Got Into Magic, I Realised I Had Been Doing It All Along, Ever Since I Wrote My First Pathetic Story Or Poem When I Was Twelve Or Whatever. This Has All Been My Magic, My Way Of Dealing With It.

I Try To Do Things In Comics That Cannot Be Repeated By Television, By Movies, By Interactive Entertainment.

This Is Not Anarchy, Eve. This Is Chaos.

There Is No Substitute For Practical Experience, And If You Want To Write About People You Ought To Put Down That Comic Book And Go Out And Meet Some Of Them Rather Than Studying The Way That Stan Lee Or Chris Claremont Depict People.

What Does Fighting Crime Mean, Exactly? Does It Mean Upholding The Law When A Woman Shoplifts To Feed Her Children, Or Does It Mean Struggling To Uncover The Ones Who, Quite Legally, Have Brought About Her Poverty?

I Shall Die Here. Every Last Inch Of Me Shall Perish. Except One. An Inch. It's Small And It's Fragile And It's The Only Thing In The World Worth Having. We Must Never Lose It, Or Sell It, Or Give It Away. We Must Never Let Them Take It From Us.

With So Much Chaos, Someone Will Do Something Stupid. And When They Do, Things Will Turn Nasty.

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.

Yes, Of Course, The Whole Idea Is Utterly Inane, But To Let Its Predictable Inanities Blind You To Its Truly Fabulous And Breathtaking Aspects Is To Do Both Oneself And The Genre A Disservice.

The Multiplying Villainies Of Nature Do Swarm Upon Him... [from Macbeth]

There Is No Coincidence. Only The Illusion Of Coincidence.

I Don't Really Think That Very Much Is Interesting About The Superhero As An Archetype.

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.

I Doubt That There Are Many Screenplays Of Movies That Either Of Us Have Seen Over The Past 10 Years That Were First Drafts, Or Were The Work Of Purely One Person. In My World, The Actors And The Director Are All Made Of Paper, And They Do Exactly What I Say. I Feel Much More In Control Of The Finished Work. I Feel Like The Statement That I'm Making - Even Though It's In A Medium By No Means As Glamorous Or As Widely Recognized As Film - Is At Least The Statement That I Wanted To Make. That's A Lot More Important To Me Than The Allure Of Working For Hollywood.

Art Is, Like Magic, The Science Of Manipulating Symbols, Words Or Images To Achieve Changes In Consciousness

I'm A Very Smug Show-off At Heart. I'm Altogether Too Pleased With Myself. The Big Boost For Me Is To Be Able To Turn Out Something That I Think Is Pretty Marvelous, Like 'lost Girls.' I'm Not In It For Money, I'm Just In It For The Glory.

I Should Just Keep Me Mouth Shut, I Just Upset People.

I Thought As Much. Miss Murray, Though I Am A Beast, Do Not Think That I Am Stupid. I Know That I Am Hideous And Hateful. I Am Not Loved, Nor Ever Hope To Be. Nor Am I Fool Enough To Think That What I Feel For You Is Love. But In This World, Alone, I Do Not Hate You. And Alone In This World, You Do Not Hate Me.

I’ve Known A Lot Of People Go Mad Over The Years, And It Is More Distressing Than People Dying. People Dying Is Quite Natural, People Going Mad Is The Complete Antithesis Of That.

But What I Hope Most Of All Is That You Understand What I Mean When I Tell You That Even Though I Do Not Know You, And Even Though I May Never Meet You, Laugh With You, Cry With You, Or Kiss You. I Love You. With All My Heart, I Love You.

With Science, Ideas Can Germinate Within A Bed Of Theory, Form, And Practice That Assists Their Growth... But We As Gardeners, Must Beware... For Some Seeds Are The Seeds Of Ruin... And The Most Iridescent Blooms Are Often The Most Dangerous

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.

Madness Is The Emergency Exit. You Can Just Step Outside, And Close The Door On All Those Dreadful Things That Happened. Forever.

When I Hear Alcoholics Talk About Having Their Demons, I Think That They're Probably Absolutely Literally Correct.

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?

Truly, Whoever We Are, Wherever We Reside, We Exist Upon The Whim Of Murderers.

Remember, Remember, The Fifth Of November, The Gunpowder Treason And Plot. I Know Of No Reason Why The Gunpowder Treason Should Ever Be Forgot... But What Of The Man? I Know His Name Was Guy Fawkes And I Know, In 1605, He Attempted To Blow Up The Houses Of Parliament.

Now Everything Is Wonderful And Hazardous And Nothing's Hypothetical.

Our Masters Have Not Heard The People's Voice For Generations And It Is Much, Much Louder Than They Care To Remember.

Ideas Are Bulletproof.

Art Makes Us Feel Less Alone. It Makes Us Think: Somebody Else Has Thought This, Somebody Else Has Had These Feelings.

I Live My Life Free Of Compromise, And Step Into The Shadows Without Complaint Or Regret.

As I See It, Part Of The Art Of Being A Hero Is Knowing When You Don't Need To Be One Anymore.

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.

Trending Author

Carroll Quigley

Katherine Jenkins

Elizabeth Kenny

Category