Quotes

[on "worshipping" the Roman snake god Glycon] "The only references there are to him in the literature, which are very disparaging, are in the works of the philosopher Lucien. Lucien explains that the whole Glycon cult was an enormous fraud, and that Glycon was a glove puppet. And I've got no reason to disbelieve that whatsoever. To me, I think that's perfect. If I'm gonna have a god, I prefer it to be a complete hoax and a glove puppet because I'm not likely to start believing that glove puppet created the universe or anything dangerous like that."

The world of ideas is in certain senses deeper, truer than reality; this solid television less significant than the Idea of television. 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.

"It's 1988 now. Margaret Thatcher is entering her third term of office and talking confidently of an unbroken Conservative leadership well into the next century. My youngest daughter is seven and the tabloid press are circulating the idea of concentration camps for persons with AIDS. The new riot police wear wear black visors, as do their horses, and their vans have rotating video cameras mounted on top. The government has expressed a desire to eradicate homosexuality, even as an abstract concept, and one can only speculate as to which minority will be the next legislated against. I'm thinking of taking my family and getting out of this country soon, sometime over the next couple of years. It's cold and it's mean spirited and I don't like it here anymore. Goodnight England. Goodnight Home Serve and V for Victory. Hello the Voice of Fate and V for Vendetta." - from his 1988 introduction to V For Vendetta.

Media and fame, they're like an element as much as water and fire are. They're 20th century elements, they're the ones that we didn't have before in this way, and the people who are thrown into that grinder are still being thrown in without and preparation, without any understanding of what it is they're being asked to face.

"The answer I always fall back on is to quote Raymond Chandler. People said: 'Raymond, don't you feel devastated by how Hollywood has destroyed your books?' And he would take them into his study, point to the bookshelf and say, 'There they are. Look, they're fine.' The film has got nothing to do with my work. It has a coincidental title to a book I've done and they've given me a huge wedge of money. No problem with that" - on the subject of how he feels of Hollywood's treatment of his works.

I'd rather my work maintain my only profile. It doesn't really matter to readers whether I exist or not, now does it? It's only the work. I don't want them to admire my haircut. I don't want them to admire my complexion or my trim physique. If they enjoy the story, then that's great. The contact between me and them has been successfully completed, you know?

"I also wanted to write about power politics. Ronald Reagan was president. But I was worried readers might switch off if they thought I was attacking someone they admired. So we set "Watchmen" in a world where Richard Nixon was in his fourth term - because you're not going to get much argument that Nixon was scum! For me, the '80s were worrying. 'Mutually assured destruction'. 'Voodoo economics'. A culture of complacency...I was writing about the times I lived in". (on the political approach to the Watchmen comic book series).

It is important to me that I should be able to do whatever I want. 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.

I'm perhaps overstating my case here a bit, but I think I lent an awful lot of literary and intellectual credibility to the American comics business and to the comics business in general when I entered it. I don't feel the same way about comics any more, I really don't. I never loved the comic industry. I used to love the comics medium. I still do love the comics medium in its pure platonic, essential form, but the comics medium as it stands seems to me to have been allowed to become a cucumber patch for producing new movie franchise.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was the reason why I decided to take my name off all subsequent films.

[on being disassociated with the film adaptations of his work]: "I want them to say, 'We're not going to give you any money for your work, you're not going to get any credit for it and we're not going to put your name on it.' To see a line of dialogue or a character that I have poured that much emotional involvement into, to see them casually travestied and watered down and distorted... it's kind of painful. It's much better just to avoid them altogether."

A real writer doesn't just want to write; a real writer has to write.

The League film cost 100 million because Sean Connery wanted 17 million of that - and a bigger explosion that the one he'd had in his last film. It's in his contract that he has to have a bigger explosion with every film he's in. In The Rock he'd blown up an island, and he was demanding in The League that he blow up, was it Venice or something like that? It would have been the moon in his next movie.

100 million dollars - that's what they spent on the Watchmen film which nearly didn't come out because of the lawsuit, that's what they spent on The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen which shouldn't have come out but did anyway. Do we need any more shitty films in this world? We have quite enough already. Whereas the 100 million dollars could sort out the civil unrest in Haiti. And the books are always superior, anyway.

There is more integrity in comics. It sounds simplistic, but I believe there is a formula that you can apply to almost any work of modern culture...

We had one particularly dense Hollywood producer say, 'You don't even have to do the book, just stick your name on this idea and I'll make the film and you'll get a lot of money - it's... The League Of Extraordinary Animals! It'll be like Puss In Boots!' And I just said, 'No, no, no. Never mention this to me again.'

The main reason why comics can't work as films is largely because everybody who is ultimately in control of the film industry is an accountant. These people may be able to add up and balance the books, but in every other area they are stupid and incompetent and don't have any talent. And this is why a film is going to be a work that's done by dozens and dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of people. They're going to show it to the backers and then they're going to say, we want this in it, and this in it... and where's the monster?

I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying. It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The 'Watchmen' film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms. Can't we get something else? Perhaps some takeout? Even Chinese worms would be a nice change.

The majority of films feel like a waste of two hours of my life. This is probably because I'm an increasingly cranky and reclusive weirdo.

I was starving. I've always liked comic books. Since I as 6 or 7. I'd discovered American comic books at age 7. I later came to appreciate comics as an art form, and realized that even with glorious exceptions like Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtz, this was a field that was still largely untouched. . Its great work still lay in the future at that point.

And I was working for a subcontractor to the gas board. Miserable office job. This was in the late 70s. I'd been through a series of fairly miserable jobs after my hurried removal from the grammar school that I was in. -- on deciding to become a comic writer

I think what I said after Watchmen and that, was that I no longer felt the super hero form was really the best way to tell important meaningful stories. That if I wanted to do a story on the environment, I think it would be better without the swamp monster in it, if I wanted to do a story about politics, it would be better not to have a bunch of superheroes in it. I believe that the superhero icon still has a valuable power in it. It kind of transformed my childhood. Its a talisman of the imagination.

They were powerful as a way of opening up rooms in my imagination when I was a child. They were very very valuable to me. And the fact that you can use them to tell allegorical stories or whatever, that doesn't mean you should. "Batman: The Killing Joke", which still sells, and I believe that it has been accepted that it was the main influence on the first Batman film, for what's that worth, is a terrible book. I mean, it doesn't say anything. Its talking about Batman and the Joker, and says that yes, psychologically Batman and the joker are mirror images of each other. So? You know. You're never going to meet somebody remotely like either of those two people. You're not going to meet people who have been driven mad in that way. -- on the superhero genre

There is a certain amount of darkness in magic but there is much more radiance and light. And it is purely about the world of ideas. -- on magic

... it was done while I was doing Watchmen, or just after or something, I'm not sure which but it was too close to Watchmen. I mean, Brian [Bolland] did a wonderful job on the art but I don't think it's a very good book. It's not saying anything very interesting. -- on "The Killing Joke"

... But at the end of the day, Watchmen was something to do with power, V for Vendetta was about fascism and anarchy, The Killing Joke was just about Batman and the Joker - and Batman and the Joker are not really symbols of anything that are real, in the real world, they're just two comic book characters. -- on "The Killing Joke"

The idea was to do a documentary comic about a murder. I concluded that there was a way of approaching the [Ripper] murders in a completely different way. I changed the emphasis from 'whodunit' to 'what happened'. I'd seen advertisements for Douglas Adams' book "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency". A holistic detective? You wouldn't just have to solve the crime, you'd have to solve the entire world that that crime happened in. That was the twist that I needed. -- on "From Hell"

Wanted people to have some idea of what it would be like to spend two hours in a room cutting up a woman. There was no possible sense of glamour about it. That seemed to be the only honest way to do it. -- on the violence in "From Hell"

You couldn't do it. There certainly couldn't be the violence [of the book]. That would be too much. It would be just unpleasant. The blood is black and white in the comic, which provides a necessary distancing. -- on translating the level and detail of violence in "From Hell" to a film

I left school at the age of seventeen and my first job was hacking up sheep carcasses for the Co-Op Hide and Skin Division. It certainly gave me an insight into life, because we had to turn up at 7:30am and drag these blood-stained sheepskins out of these vats of freezing cold water, blood, and various animal byproducts. Then we used to mutilate them in a variety of strange ways... but, oddly, a form of concentration-camp humor arose, and many was the happy hour that we had throwing whacked-off sheep's testicles at each other.

There is something about the quality of comics that makes things possible that you couldn't do in any other medium. Things that we did in Watchmen on paper could be frankly horrible or sensationalist or unpleasant if you were to interpret them literally through the medium of cinema. When it's just lines on paper, the reader is in control of the experience - it's a tableau vivant. And that gives it the necessary distance. It's not the same when you're being dragged through it at 24 frames per second.

Much as I love the medium, I despise the industry. I've always despised it to a certain degree but after this last few years and all this nonsense with the films, I believe it to be a completely poisonous place that isn't really going anywhere. I did once feel I was part of a movement that wanted to change comics into something was valuable to culture, but I don't really feel that kinship in the way I used to. -- on the comic book industry

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. That's the reward. That's better than money.

I believe that every single individual human being should probably make their own peace with the universe. I mean, we're all of us different emotionally, we're all different physically, intellectually... it would be really odd if we were all the same spiritually. So that's why I have a problem with religion per se, because "religion," the very word, it comes from the same root word as "ligature" and "ligament" and it means, "to be bound together in one belief" which I find a bit creepy and a bit unnatural.

[on the flimsy origin stories of superheroes] People, I'm sure, have had their parents killed in front of their eyes. I think that would probably lead to a life in analysis, and probably all sorts of personal problems... it probably wouldn't lead to you becoming a bat-themed vigilante.

I've always had my problems with genre, and I am coming to the conclusion that genre has really only ever been a convenience.

I try to put a lot of long words at the start of my books, to keep the filth out.

"LSD was an incredible experience. Not that I'm recommending it for anybody else; but for me it kind of 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 me on me.

[speaking in 2022] Hundreds of thousands of adults [are] lining up to see characters and situations that had been created to entertain the 12-year-old boys - and it was always boys - of 50 years ago. I didn't really think that superheroes were adult fare. I think that this was a misunderstanding born of what happened in the 1980s - to which I must put my hand up to a considerable share of the blame, though it was not intentional - when things like Watchmen were first appearing. There were an awful lot of headlines saying 'Comics Have Grown Up'. I tend to think that, no, comics hadn't grown up. There were a few titles that were more adult than people were used to. But the majority of comics titles were pretty much the same as they'd ever been. It wasn't comics growing up. I think it was more comics meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way. I said round about 2011 that I thought that it had serious and worrying implications for the future if millions of adults were queueing up to see Batman movies. Because that kind of infantilisation - that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities - that can very often be a precursor to fascism.

It struck me that it might be interesting for once to do an almost blue-collar warlock. Somebody who was streetwise, working class, and from a different background than the standard run of comic book mystics. John Constantine started to grow out of that.

I'm not a millionaire but I'm very comfortable doing what I do, and I'm more productive now than I was in my mid-20s. It's all down to functionality eventually. If you're functional it doesn't matter if you're mad.

Everybody is special. Everybody. Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain, everybody. Everybody has their story to tell...

Anarchy wears two faces, both Creator and Destroyer. Thus Destroyers topple empires; make a canvas of clean rubble where creators can then build a better world. Rubble, once achieved makes further ruins' means irrelevant. Away with our explosives, then! Away with our Destroyers! They have no place within our better world. But let us raise a toast to all our bombers, all our bastards, most unlovely and most unforgivable, let's drink their health, then meet with them no more.

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.

Isn't it strange how life turns into melodrama?

Naïveté can also be detected in my supposition that it would take something as melodramatic as a near-miss nuclear conflict to nudge Britain towards fascism... The simple fact that much of the historical background of the story proceeds from a predicted Conservative defeat in the 1983 General Election should tell you how reliable we were in our roles as Cassandras. (speaking about "V for Vendetta" in 1990)

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.

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.

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.

On comic-book films: 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.

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

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.