Top 300 Alan Moore Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Alan Moore

102. “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.”

— Alan Moore

103. “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.”

— Alan Moore

104. “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.”

— Alan Moore

105. “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.”

— Alan Moore

106. “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

107. “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.”

— Alan Moore

108. “Never compromise. Not even in the face of Armageddon.”

— Alan Moore

109. “Life isn’t divided into genres.”

— Alan Moore

110. “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.”

— Alan Moore

111. “London has been used as the emblematic English city, but it’s far from representative of what life in England is actually about.”

— Alan Moore

112. “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.”

— Alan Moore

113. “I try to do things in comics that cannot be repeated by television, by movies, by interactive entertainment.”

— Alan Moore

114. “I’m not a particularly dark individual. I have my moments, it’s true, but I do have a sense of humor.”

— Alan Moore

115. “I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for the opportunities the library gave me.”

— Alan Moore

116. “Happiness is a prison, Evey. Happiness is the most insidious prison of all.”

— Alan Moore

117. “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.”

— Alan Moore

118. “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.”

— Alan Moore

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

— Alan Moore

120. “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. This 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. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.”

— Alan Moore

121. “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.”

— Alan Moore

122. “It’s cold and it’s mean spirited and I don’t like it here anymore.”

— Alan Moore

123. “How can two people hate so much without knowing each other?”

— Alan Moore

124. “Authority allows two roles: the torturer and the tortured. Twists people into joyless mannequins that fear and hate, while culture plunges into the abyss.”

— Alan Moore

125. “Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains...”

— Alan Moore

126. “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.”

— Alan Moore

127. “Please don’t worry. It’s a psychological complaint, common amongst ex-librarians. You see, she thinks she’s a coffee table edition...”

— Alan Moore

128. “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.”

— Alan Moore

129. “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.”

— Alan Moore

130. “I am not man so much as syndrome; as a voice that bellows in the human heart. I am a rain. I cannot be contained. Free of Life, how then shall I be shackled? Free of Time, how then shall History be my cage? I am a wave, an influence. Who then shall be made safe from me?”

— Alan Moore

131. “We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.”

— Alan Moore

132. “Aleister Crowley once stated that the most important grimoire, or book of magical instruction, that anyone could ever conceivably own would be an etymological dictionary, and in my opinion he was exactly right. I keep it right here by my desk, and just 10 minutes ago it confirmed for me that I had the spelling of “proprioception” right all along, even though my spell-checker had raised a crinkly red eyebrow.”

— Alan Moore

133. “A world grows up around me. Am I shaping it, or do its predetermined contours guide my hand?”

— Alan Moore

134. “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.”

— Alan Moore

135. “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!”

— Alan Moore

136. “War is a perversion of sex.”

— Alan Moore

137. “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.”

— Alan Moore

138. “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.”

— Alan Moore

139. “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.”

— Alan Moore

140. “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.”

— Alan Moore

141. “Equality and freedom are not luxuries to lightly cast aside. Without them, order cannot long endure before approaching depths beyond imagining.”

— Alan Moore

142. “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...”

— Alan Moore

143. “Academic stress-related pre-birth suicides.”

— Alan Moore

144. “When it’s done, only our enemies leave roses.”

— Alan Moore

145. “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.”

— Alan Moore

146. “To some degree Satanism is purely a kind of disease of Christianity. You’ve got to really be Christian to believe in Satan.”

— Alan Moore

147. “Nothing’s that simple, not even things that are simply awful.”

— Alan Moore

148. “I heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Life seems harsh, and cruel. Says he feels all alone in threatening world. Doctor says: “Treatment is simple. The great clown – Pagliacci – is in town. Go see him. That should pick you up.” Man bursts into tears. “But doctor... ” he says “I am Pagliacci.” Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.”

— Alan Moore

149. “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.”

— Alan Moore

150. “The Conservative Party is a religion in that they are bound together by belief. Almost any organization has its religious aspects.”

— Alan Moore