Michael > Michael's Quotes

“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.”
― Alan Moore

“Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“The past can't hurt you anymore, not unless you let it.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“Each day and every deed’s eternal, little boy. Live them in such a way that you can bear to live with them eternally.”
― Alan Moore, Jerusalem

“Places don’t stay where you left them. You go back there, anywhere, and even if it looks exactly how it did before, it’s somewhere else.”
― Alan Moore, Jerusalem

“Faith is for sissies who daren't go and look for themselves. That’s my basic position. Magic is based upon gnosis. Direct knowledge.”
― Alan Moore, Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths

“Emotional position is part of it, but as an individual you are not your emotions, neither are you your intellect. These are things that you have . They're not things that you are . Therefore you have to start to become aware of the different requirements that human beings have, the different areas that they like to be satisfied in. Which means becoming aware of yourself. I mean, as a writer you're gonna have to understand pretty much the whole universe. But the best place to start is by understanding the inner universe. 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. So. To understand the universe there's worse advice than that which was carved above the shrine of the Delphi oracle. Where it just said: “Know thyself”. Understand yourself. Know thyself is a magical goal, but like I say to me there is very little difference between magic and creative art in any sense – the laws of one apply perfectly well to the other.”
― Alan Moore

“Things have their shape in time, not space alone. Some marble blocks have statues within them, embedded in their future.”
― Alan Moore

“Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world.”
― Alan Moore, Voice of the Fire

“Three things, then. Escape, and finding work, and then explaining himself adequately. It was just those areas he had trouble with. Everything else, he was all right about.”
― Alan Moore, Jerusalem

“Finally, faced with horrors both intolerable and unavoidable, I chose madness.”
― Alan Moore

“You piss off a bard, and forget about putting a curse on you, he might put a satire on you.”
― Alan Moore

“I do prefer to criticise things from a position of ignorance.”
― Alan Moore

“A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having.”
― Alan Moore

“Tis Dante I prefer. In his Inferno he suggests the one true path from Hell lies at its very heart...
...and that in order to escape, we must instead go further IN.”
― Alan Moore, From Hell

“Fame has replaced the sea as the element of choice for adventure.”
― Alan Moore

“Do not weep. Being is enough. There, that is all. I am done...”
― Alan Moore, Top 10, Vol. 2

“I've come to the conclusion that what superheroes might be — in their current incarnation, at least — is a symbol of American reluctance to involve themselves in any kind of conflict without massive tactical superiority.”
― Alan Moore

“Happiness is a prison, Evey. Happiness is the most insidious prison of all.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“Nothing Alan Moore writes can be blah-blah-blahed," Park said solemnly.
Eleanor shrugged and bit her lip.
"I’m beginning to think you shouldn’t have started reading comics with a book that completely deconstructs the last fifty years of the genre," he said.
"All I’m hearing is blah, blah, blah, genre.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

“Isn't it strange how life turns into melodrama?”
― Alan Moore

“Bond believes we are his pawns. He thinks no-one observes his game. But I am No-One. I observe everything, and to play with Nemo is to play games with Destruction.”
― Alan Moore, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Absolute Edition: 1

“Things have their forms not only in space, but also in time.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“Now, as I understand it, the bards were feared. They were respected, but more than that they were feared. If you were just some magician, if you'd pissed off some witch, then what's she gonna do, she's gonna put a curse on you, and what's gonna happen? Your hens are gonna lay funny, your milk's gonna go sour, maybe one of your kids is gonna get a hare-lip or something like that — no big deal.

You piss off a bard, and forget about putting a curse on you, he might put a satire on you. And if he was a skilful bard, he puts a satire on you, it destroys you in the eyes of your community, it shows you up as ridiculous, lame, pathetic, worthless, in the eyes of your community, in the eyes of your family, in the eyes of your children, in the eyes of yourself, and if it's a particularly good bard, and he's written a particularly good satire, then three hundred years after you're dead, people are still gonna be laughing, at what a twat you were.”
― Alan Moore

“... the most probable of all my theorems, is that life is ordered by the principles of some religion so peculiar and obscure it has no followers, and none may fathom it, nor know the rituals by which to court its favour.”
― Alan Moore, Voice of the Fire

“I've developed a theory that there's an inverse relationship between money and imagination. That if you've got lots of imagination then you don't really need much money, and if you've got lots of money then you won't bother with much imagination. 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.”
― Alan Moore

“Memories can be vile. Repulsive little brutes, like children I suppose. But can we live without them? Memories are what our reason is based upon. If we can't face them, we deny reason itself! Although, why not? We aren't contractually tied down to rationality. There is no sanity clause. So when you find yourself locked down in an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember: There's always madness. You can just step outside and close the door, and all those dreadful things that happened, you can lock them away. Madness... is an emergency exit.”
― Alan Moore, Batman: The Killing Joke

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life