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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.

-Alan Moore

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Way Back In The

Alan Moore

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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.

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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.

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.

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

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

Happiness Is The Most Insidious Prison Of All.

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

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.

...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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

There Is An Inverse Relationship Between Imagination And Money.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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

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.

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

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

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.

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'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'd Prefer To Include Sex Scenes Alongside The Adventure Scenes And Everyday-life Scenes, As If They Were All Part Of The Same Thing. Which Of Course They Are. Sex Is Not Discrete From The Rest Of Our Existence.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Lsd Was An Incredible Experience. Not That I’m Recommending It For Anybody Else; But For Me It Kind Of – It Hammered Home To Me That Reality Was Not A Fixed Thing. That The Reality That We Saw About Us Every Day Was One Reality, And A Valid One – But That There Were Others, Different Perspectives Where Different Things Have Meaning That Were Just As Valid. That Had A Profound Effect On Me.

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

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.

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.

In A Sense, The Story, Or Poem Or Verse Or Whatever It Is You're Writing, You Can Kind Of Think Of It As A Kind Of Projectile. Imagine It Is A Kind Of Projectile Which Has Been Specially Shaped To Be Aerodynamic, And That Your Target Is The Soft Grey Putty Of The Reader's Brain.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

I Did It Thirty-five Minutes Ago.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The World's A Stage, & Everything Else Is Vaudeville.

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'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'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.

Through My Blue Fingers, Pink Grains Are Falling, Haphazard, Random, A Disorganized Stream Of Silicone That Seems Pregnant With The Possibility Of Every Conceivable Shape… But This Is Illusion. Things Have Their Shape In Time, Not Space Alone. Some Marble Blocks Have Statues Within Them, Embedded In Their Future.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Never Despair. Never Surrender.

Never Surrender

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

American Love — Like Coke In Green Glass Bottles...they Don't Make It Anymore.

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

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

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

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

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.

Does The Human Heart Know Chasms So Abysmal?

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

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 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

I'm The Idea Of The Human Imagination, Which, When You Think About It, Is The Only Thing We Can Really Be Certain Isn't Imaginary.

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

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

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.

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.

Who Makes The World? Perhaps The World Is Not Made. Perhaps Nothing Is Made. Perhaps It Simply Is, Has Been, Will Always Be There…a Clock Without A Craftsman.

They Say That Life's A Game, & Then They Take The Board Away.

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

Multiple Choice

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.

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’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.

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

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

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

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

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

It's Cold And It's Mean Spirited And I Don't Like It Here Anymore.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Please! Don't All Leave. Somebody Has To Do It, Don't You See? Somebody Has To Save The World.

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.

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

All Culture Must Have Arisen From Cult.

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.

The Dusk Reeks Of Fornication And Bad Consciences.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

All We Ever See Of Stars Are Their Old Photographs.

Old Photographs

Nothing Ends, Adrian. Nothing Ever Ends.

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William Peter Blatty

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