Critics Of Religion

"Did you think to kill me? There's no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There is only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof."

"In fact, let us not mince words… the management is terrible! We’ve had a string of embezzlers, frauds, liars, and lunatics making a string of catastrophic decisions. This is plain fact. But who elected them? It was you! You who appointed these people! You who gave them the power to make decisions for you! While I’ll admit that anyone can make a mistake once, to go on making the same lethal errors century after century seems to me to be nothing short of deliberate. You have encouraged these malicious incompetents, who have made your working life a shambles. You have accepted without question their senseless orders. You have allowed them to fill your workplace with dangerous and unproven machines. All you had to say was “No.” You have no spine. You have no pride. You are no longer an asset to the company."

"This is an imaginary story (which may never happen, but then again may) about a perfect man who came from the sky and did only good. It tells of his twilight, when the great battles were over and the great miracles long since performed; of how his enemies conspired against him and of that final war in the snowblind wastes beneath the Northern Lights; of the women he loved and of the choice he made between them; of how he broke his most sacred oath, and how finally all the things he had were taken from him save one. It ends with a wink. It begins in a quiet midwestern town, one summer afternoon in the quiet midwestern future. Away in the big city, people still sometimes glance up hopefully from the sidewalks, glimpsing a distant speck in the sky... but no: it's only a bird, only a plane — Superman died ten years ago. This is an imaginary story... aren't they all?"

"Hollywood, television and film is not my prime area of interest. Because I would never have any control, working in those areas. It’s nice to get the money from a Hollywood project, but whatever they do with it, it would be their piece of work, and not mine."

"Memories so treacherous..."

"Jordan Elliot: What's for dinner?"

"In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends."

"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. You can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. Forever."

"We’re all puppets, Laurie. I’m just a puppet who can see the strings."

"There is a house above the world, where the over-people gather. There is a man with wings like a bird. There is a man who can see across the planet and wring diamonds from its anthracite. There is a man who moves so fast that his life is an endless gallery of statues. In the house above the world, the over-people gather... And sit... And listen... ...To a dry, mad voice that whispers of Earthdeath."

"It's a new world, Arcane... It's full of shopping malls... and striplights and software. The dark corners are being pushed back... a little more every day. We're things of the shadow, you and I... And there isn't as much shadow... as there used to be.."

"New-age woolly-hat Glastonbury mystics weary me, sometimes, but they talk about energy, the energy of a place, of a person. We all know what they mean, but at the same time it has to be said that this is not energy that is going to show up on an autometer. We’re not talking about energy in the conventional sense that physics talks about energy. To me, energy is information – I think you can make that bold a statement. The only lines of energy that link up disparate sites in London are lines of information, that have been drawn by an informed mind. The energy that we put forth is information we have taken in. We will see a work of art and it will give us inspiration, it will give us energy. It’s given us information that we can turn to our own use and put out as something else. That’s the kind of energy that we – and psychogeography – are talking about."

"There is a kind of synergy between the different forms of work, you’ll learn things from one sort of work that will have tremendous application in another. They all tend to pull each other forward."

"I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to pretend it looked 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 is avoiding the real horror. The horror is this: In the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness. We are alone. There is nothing else."

"I've demonstrated there's no difference between me and everyone else! 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."

"Murder? Don't talk to me about murder. I invented murder!"

"I don’t really feel, with the recent films, that they have stood by what I assumed were their original principles. So I asked for DC Comics to send all of the money from any future TV series or films to Black Lives Matter."

"Maybe the world..has run out of room..for monsters."

"I didn’t mean my experiments with comics to be immediately taken up as something that the whole industry should do. When I was doing things like ‘Watchmen,’ I was not saying that dark psychopathic characters are really cool, but that does seem to be the message that the industry took for the next 20 years."

"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. As a result, there's a growing number of professional writers now going to small presses, self-publishing, or trying other kinds of [distribution] strategies. The same is true of music and cinema. 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."

"Now they’re called ‘graphic novels’, which sounds sophisticated and you can charge a lot more for them. What appealed to me most about comics is no more, and these innocent and inventive and imaginative superhero characters from the ’40s, ‘50s, ‘60s are being recycled to a modern audience as if they were adult fare."

"I did an interview where I was asked for the best advice I'd been given. I couldn'€™t think of anything, so I read from the back of a packet of Swan Vestas matches by the phone: "Keep in a dry place, keep away from children and strike gently away from the body." They'd written it up without any sense of irony."

"There is a red and angry world... Red things happen there. The world eats your wife... Eats your friends... Eats all the things... that make you human... And you become a monster. And the world... just keeps on eating."

"I saw no reason why you couldn't create a work of pornography that adhered to all the same standards as the best art or literature. The big difference between art and pornography is that art, at its best, makes you feel less alone. You see a painting or read a piece of writing that expresses a thought that you had but didn't express, and you suddenly feel less alone. Pornography, on the other hand, tends to engender feelings of self-disgust, isolation and wretchedness. I wanted to change that."

"Sexually progressive cultures gave us mathematics, literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust. Not that I’m trying to load my argument, of course."

"You can't kill a vegetable by shooting it in the head."

"There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse is often closer to the truth."

"There is an inverse relationship between imagination and money."

"If I write a crappy comic book, it doesn't cost the budget of an emergent Third World nation. When you've got these kinds of sums involved in creating another two hours of entertainment for Western teenagers, I feel it crosses the line from being merely distasteful to being wrong. To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate — unlike most films."

"Sex is glorious, it's how we all got here, and it's most people's favourite activity."

"If you wear black, then kindly, irritating strangers will touch your arm consolingly and inform you that the world keeps on turning. They're right. It does. However much you beg it to stop. It turns and lets grenadine spill over the horizon, sends hard bars of gold through my window and I wake up and feel happy for three seconds and then I remember. It turns and tips people out of their beds and into their cars, their offices, an avalanche of tiny men and women tumbling through life... All trying not to think about what's waiting at the bottom. Sometimes it turns and sends us reeling into each other's arms. We cling tight, excited and laughing, strangers thrown together on a moving funhouse floor. Intoxicated by the motion we forget all the risks. And then the world turns... And somebody falls off... And oh God it's such a long way down. Numb with shock, we can only stand and watch as they fall away from us, gradually getting smaller... Receding in our memories until they're no longer visible. We gather in cemeteries, tense and silent as if for listening for the impact; the splash of a pebble dropped into a dark well, trying to measure its depth. Trying to measure how far we have to fall. No impact comes; no splash. The moment passes. The world turns and we turn away, getting on with our lives... Wrapping ourselves in comforting banalities to keep us warm against the cold. "Time's a great healer." "At least it was quick." "The world keeps turning. Oh Alec— Alec's dead."

"Originally I was content to just simply accept the money, that was offered when people had adapted my comic books into films. Eventually I decided to refuse to accept any of the money for the films, and to ask if my name could be taken off of them, so that I no longer had to endure the embarrasment of seeing my work travested in this manner. The first film that they made of my work was "From Hell" Which was an adaptation of my "Jack the Ripper" narrative … In which they replaced my gruff Dorset police constable with Johnny Depp's Absinthe-swigging dandy. The next film to be made from one of my books was the regrettable "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"… Where the only resemblence it had to my book was a similar title. The most recent film that they have made of mine is apparently this new "V for Vendetta" movie which was probably the final straw between me and Hollywood. They were written to be impossible to reproduce in terms of cinema, and so why not leave them simply as a comic in the way that they were intended to be. And if you are going to make them into films, please try to make them into better ones, than the ones I have been cursed with thus far."

"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."

"The DC comics were always a lot more true blue. Very enjoyable, but they were big, brave uncles and aunties who probably insisted on a high standard of you know mental and physical hygiene. Whereas the Stan Lee stuff, the Marvel comics, he went from one-dimensional characters whose only characteristic was they dressed up in costumes and did good. Whereas Stan Lee had this huge breakthrough of two-dimensional characters. So, they dress up in costumes and do good, but they've got a bad heart. Or a bad leg. I actually did think for a long while that having a bad leg was an actual character trait."

"Life isn’t divided 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."

"Reading Alan Moore makes me go weak at the knees."

"Martin credits his experience in Hollywood for helping him hold out, saying that many of his fellow novelists end up in a situation where their books are changed dramatically. “Some of them come out of the premieres looking like their children have been gassed...but I can’t think of anyone other than Alan Moore who’s returned a check,” he says."

"Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, "if he could plot, we'd all have to get together and kill him." Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan's writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded. If all you want is plot, go and read a Tom Clancy novel."

"If there was no point to being offensive (as with a high number of comedians who frequent the average working men's club), then the perpetrator will either be squeezed out of business or be relegated to working in bottom-of-the-heap sleaze pits where nothing more than vulgarity is demanded. Alternately, if there was some integrity behind all the outrage, the perpetrators become persecuted legends with a fanatical cult following and generally exercise tremendous influence upon the artists that come after them. In comedy, Lenny Bruce is an example. In music, perhaps the Sex Pistols. In comic books, EC would fit the bill."

""It is an everyday heroism to choose to do the right thing, rather than not to do the right thing. These are moments of heroism, and they're basically what hold the culture, the species together. Without them, we'd be nowhere. So they are vitally important. I'm all for heroes…" He was asked which of the heroes he has written is most like him. "It's all of them, that's what being a writer is. They are all facets of you, all of us have everyone inside us somewhere, it's a matter of searching through the files until you find the right one, boosting it a little bit… but they're all me, basically." And he also talked at length about how magic was the natural way of seeing the world, and that it was the origins of all modern culture "possibly aside from sport, which might have been the hunters showing off." And how "art and magic are both concerned with taking something that does not exist and bringing it into manifestation" before he is happy to admit that it may all be some psychotic delusion."

"Okay, when I said Alan Moore killed comics, I've probably got to qualify that. It's more that, in the 90s, comics committed suicide and it was Alan who handed them the rope."

"He also mused that, as he was writing ‘V for Vendetta’ in 1981, he didn’t quite imagine how certain world-building elements he used would actually come true. One of the features of the novel’s 1997 dystopian society was all-pervasive government surveillance. Imagine my surprise when the Tony Blair Labour government – which was basically a different flavor of Conservative government... came into power in 1997 and immediately rolled out security cameras across the entire country. I wondered whether they had perhaps been enormous ‘V for Vendetta’ fans in their youth."

""I think Anonymous doxed the Tunisian government, they released all their documents to the Tunisian people that kicked off the revolution,” he said. “And then Anonymous moved on to Egypt, where they did the same thing. And then they moved on to Syria, where it didn’t really go so well.”"

"The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless."

"Moore’s current focus is on exploring the nature of human experience. The 2016 book ‘Jerusalem’ was his magnum opus, explaining the ideas of eternalism, a view of reality not as something moving through time from past through present and into the future, but as a simultaneous permanent reality. “There is a persistent illusion of transience, that the shows that we used to love aren’t on television anymore, you can’t get those sweets that we used to enjoy when we were kids, that lovely building that we walked past every day, they pulled that down, our grandmothers, the people in the past who died, we’ll never see them again,” he explained."

"I suppose that the main drive is to find the edge of something and then throw myself over it."

"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."

"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."

"In his interview with RT, Moore said he probably “was in a bad mood about comics” when he made the remark, but stood by his comparison of characters like Daredevil or Batman to the Klansmen riding to quash a black riot in the Griffith movie. “I think that there is something that possibly dates back to… the Ku Klux Klan intervention in ‘Birth of a Nation’, the idea of dressing up in a mask, so that what you do doesn’t get back to you,” Moore said."

"Magic and art tend to share a lot of the same language. They both talk about evocation, invocation, and conjuring. If you’re trying to conjure a character, then maybe you should treat that with the respect that you would if you were trying to conjure a demon. Because if an image of a god is a god, then in some sense the image of a demon is a demon. I’m thinking of people like Malcolm Lowry, the exquisite author of Under the Volcano. There are kabbalistic demons that are lurking all the way through Under the Volcano, and I assume they were probably similar forces to the ones that eventually overwhelmed Lowry’s life, such as the drinking and the madness. When I hear alcoholics talk about having their demons, I think that they’re probably absolutely literally correct."