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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.

-Alan Moore

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It Wasn't So Much

Alan Moore

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

This Is An Imaginary Story...aren't They All?

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.

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

As I Come To Understand Vietnam And What It Implies About The Human Condition, I Also Realize That Few Humans Will Permit Themselves Such An Understanding.

Once A Man Has Seen Society's Black Underbelly, He Can Never Turn His Back On It. Never Pretend, Like You Do, That It Doesn't Exist.

Consciousness, Unprovable By Scientific Standards, Is Forever, Then, The Impossible Phantom In The Predictable Biologic Machine, And Your Every Thought A Genuine Supernatural Event. Your Every Thought Is A Ghost, Dancing.

Evey Hammond: Who Are You? V: Who? Who Is But The Form Following The Function Of What And What I Am Is A Man In A Mask. Evey Hammond: Well I Can See That. V: Of Course You Can. I'm Not Questioning Your Powers Of Observation I'm Merely Remarking Upon The Paradox Of Asking A Masked Man Who He Is

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’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.

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

Janey Accuses Me Of Chasing Jailbait. She Bursts Into Angry Tears, Asking If It's Because She's Getting Older. It's True. She's Aging More Noticeably Every Day — While I Am Standing Still. I Prefer The Stillness Here. I Am Tired Of Earth. These People. I Am Tired Of Being Caught In The Tangle Of Their Lives.

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.

Behind This Mask There Is More Than Just Flesh. Beneath This Mask There Is An Idea... And Ideas Are Bulletproof.

There's No Flesh Or Blood Within This Cloak To Kill. There's Only An Idea. Ideas Are Bulletproof.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've Never Really Cared Much About Money. I've Got Enough To Live On. And It's Not Like I Live In A Fancy House, It's Not Like I Own A Car, And It's Not Like I Ever Go On Holiday.

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.

Happiness Is The Most Insidious Prison Of All.

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 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.

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

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.

I Felt, If I'm Going To React I Might As Well Over React.

Love Your Rage, Not Your Cage.

Judged By The Stark, Sure-footed Portrait In Hard Time, Brian Azzarello And Richard Corben Clearly Have John Constantine Down, Cold And To The Life. Azzarellos Grasp Of Pacing, Character And Situation Resonates Through Every Scene With A Black Crystal Clarity Thats Short Of Masterful, While Corben Contributes What Is, Perhaps, One Of The Most Darkly Expressive Pieces In A Long, Already-legendary Career.

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

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.

That Pompous Phrase (graphic Novel) Was Thought Up By Some Idiot In The Marketing Department Of Dc. I Prefer To Call Them Big Expensive Comics.

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

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.

My Dear, Beautiful And Imaginative Things Can Be Destroyed. Beauty And Imagination Cannot.

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.

I Love The Smell Of Paper In The Morning; It Smells Like Victory.

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!

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

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

If The Audience Knew What They Wanted Then They Wouldn't Be The Audience, They Would Be The Artist.

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.

Existence Is Random. Has No Pattern Save What We Imagine After Staring At It For Too Long. No Meaning Save What We Choose To Impose.

I'm Disappointed In You, Adrian. I'm Very Disappointed. Reassembling Myself Was The First Trick I Learned. It Didn't Kill Osterman. Did You Really Think It Would Kill Me? I Have Walked Across The Surface Of The Sun. I Have Witnessed Events So Tiny And So Fast, They Could Hardly Be Said To Have Occurred At All. But You, Adrian, You're Just A Man. The World's Smartest Man Poses No More Threat To Me Than Does Its Smartest Termite.

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.

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

I'm Not A Particularly Dark Individual. I Have My Moments, It's True, But I Do Have A Sense Of Humor.

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.

Authority Allows Two Roles: The Torturer And The Tortured. Twists People Into Joyless Mannequins That Fear And Hate, While Culture Plunges Into The Abyss.

I Am Watching The Stars, Admiring Their Complex Trajectories Through Space And Time. I Am Trying To Give A Name To The Force That Set Them In Motion.

Artists Use Lies To Tell The Truth. Yes, I Created A Lie. But Because You Believed It, You Found Something True About Yourself.

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

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.

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

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.

There's A Notion I'd Like To See Buried: The Ordinary Person. Ridiculous. There Is No Ordinary Person.

If We Can Come Up With All Sorts Of Imaginative Ways In Which People Die, Then I Really Don't See What The Problem Is With Coming Up With Imaginative Ways In Which People Can Procreate.

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.

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

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.

In Countries Like The U.s. And Great Britain, We Exist In A Wholly Sexualized Culture, Where Everything From Cars To Snack Food Are Sold With A Healthy Slathering Of Sex To Make Them More Commercially Appealing.

Equality And Freedom Are Not Luxuries To Lightly Cast Aside. Without Them, Order Cannot Long Endure Before Approaching Depths Beyond Imagining.

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

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.

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

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.

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 Didn't Really Sign Up To Be A Celebrity, I Only Signed Up To Be A Writer.

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

Never Despair. Never Surrender.

Never Surrender

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.

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

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'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.

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

...my Point Is, I Went Crazy. When I Saw What A Black, Awful Joke The World Was. I Went Crazy As A Coot! I Admit It! Why Can't You?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

War Is A Perversion Of Sex.

I Still Can't Believe It . . . Him Comin' Here Everyday, Nobody Realizin'. Still, That's Life: Lotta Stuff Happens Under The Waterline.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I Think That The Occupy Movement Is, In One Sense, The Public Saying That They Should Be The Ones To Decide Who's Too Big To Fail.

Occupy Movement

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.

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

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.

Noise Is Relative To The Silence Preceeding It. The More Absolute The Hush, The More Shocking The Thunderclap. Our Masters Have Not Heard The Peoples Voice For Generations, Evey And It Is Much, Much Louder Than They Care To Remember.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I Don't Really Have Any Great Interest In Writing For Movies. Comics, To Me, Is A Much More Promising Field. There's Still A Lot Of Ground To Be Broken In Comics, Whereas Movies, To A Degree... I Don't Know. They're A Wonderful Art Form, But They're Not My Favorite Art Form. They Might Not Even Be In The Top Five Of My Favorite Art Forms.

For Whatever The Future Holds, One Thing Is Certain... It Just Won't Be The Same.

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.

The Past Can't Hurt You Anymore, Not Unless You Let It.

Is It Meaningless To Apologize? Never.

I've Never Watched Any Of The Adaptations Of My Books. I've Never Wanted To, And There's Absolutely No Chance Of Me Doing So In The Future.

I Don't Think There's Really Any Difference Between Art - Or Writing, Or Music - And Magic. And I Particularly Draw The Link Between Magic And Writing. I Think That They Are Profoundly Connected.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I Am Brother To Dragons, And Companion To Owls. My Skin Is Black Upon Me, And My Bones Are Burned With Heat.

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?

Yes, There Is A Conspiracy, In Fact There Are A Great Number Of Conspiracies That Are All Tripping Each Other Up. And All Of Those Conspiracies Are Run By Paranoid Fantasists And Ham-fisted Clowns. If You Are On A List Targeted By The Cia, You Really Have Nothing To Worry About. If However, You Have A Name Similar To Somebody On A List Targeted By The Cia, Then You Are Dead.

Nothing's That Simple, Not Even Things That Are Simply Awful.

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.

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?

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.

All Culture Must Have Arisen From Cult.

There Is An Inverse Relationship Between Imagination And Money.

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

This Is Not Anarchy, Eve. This Is Chaos.

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 Believe That Magic Is Art, And That Art, Whether That Be Music, Writing, Sculpture, Or Any Other Form, Is Literally Magic. Art Is, Like Magic, The Science Of Manipulating Symbols, Words Or Images, To Achieve Changes In Consciousness… Indeed To Cast A Spell Is Simply To Spell, To Manipulate Words, To Change Peoples Consciousness, And This Is Why I Believe That An Artist Or Writer Is The Closest Thing In The Contemporary World To A Shaman.

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.

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.

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

No. Not Even In The Face Of Armageddon. Never Compromise.

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.

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

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

The Dusk Reeks Of Fornication And Bad Consciences.

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

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.

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

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

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.

I'm Not Personally Connected To The Internet, Although Nearly Everyone That I Know Is, And Many Of Them Have A Great Time And No Problems With It. And On The Surface You Can See That The Internet Could Go An Awful Long Way To Educating, Enlightening, Informing And Connecting The World.

Life Isn't Divided Into Genres

I Have So Very Much. I Have So Very Little.

A Live Body And A Dead Body Contain The Same Number Of Particles. Structurally, There's No Discernible Difference. Life And Death Are Unquantifiable Abstracts. Why Should I Be Concerned?

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.

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.

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

If You're Using Sex To Sell Sneakers, Then You're Not Just Selling Sneakers, You're Selling Sex As Well, And You're Contributing To The Sexual Temperature Of Society.

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

Authority, When First Detecting Chaos At Its Heels, Will Entertain The Vilest Schemes To Save Its Orderly Facade.

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

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.

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

Nothing Ends, Adrian. Nothing Ever Ends.

Does The Human Heart Know Chasms So Abysmal?

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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'.

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.

It Seems That Every Movie Is A Remake Of Something That Was Better When It Was First Released In A Foreign Language, As A 1960s Tv Show, Or Even As A Comic Book. Now You’ve Got Theme Park Rides As The Source Material Of Movies. The Only Things Left Are Breakfast Cereal Mascots. In Our Lifetime, We Will See Johnny Depp Playing Captain Crunch.

Rorschach: Used To Come Here Often, Back When We Were Partners. Dreiberg: Oh. Uh, Yeah... Yeah, Those Were Great Times, Rorschach. Great Times. Whatever Happened To Them? Rorschach: [exiting] You Quit.

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.

It Was Kovacs Who Said "mother" Then, Muffled Under Latex. It Was Kovacs Who Closed His Eyes. It Was Rorschach Who Opened Them Again.

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.

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.

There Is No Future. There Is No Past. Do You See? Time Is Simultaneous, An Intricately Structured Jewel That Humans Insist On Viewing One Edge At A Time, When The Whole Design Is Visible In Every Facet.

There Is No Coincidence. Only The Illusion Of Coincidence.

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.

Truth Is A Well-known Pathological Liar. It Invariably Turns Out To Be Fiction Wearing A Fancy Frock. Self-proclaimed Fiction, On The Other Hand, Is Entirely Honest. You Can Tell This, Because It Comes Right Out And Says, "i'm A Liar," Right There On The Dust Jacket.

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

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.

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.

You Know What I Wish? I Wish All The Scum Of The Earth Had One Throat And I Had My Hands About It.

Scum Of The Earth

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.

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.

All It Takes Is One Bad Day To Reduce The Sanest Man Alive To Lunacy. That's How Far The World Is From Where I Am. Just One Bad Day.

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.

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

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.

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

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John C. Calhoun

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