Real life is messy, inconsistent, and it’s seldom when anything ever really gets resolved. It’s taken me a long time to realize that.

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...

Janey accuses me of chasing jailbait. She bursts into angry tears, asking if it’s because she’s getting older. It’s true. She’s aging more noticeably every day—while I am standing still. I prefer the stillness here....

Stood in firelight, sweltering. Bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night.Looked...

You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it.

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

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.

Swamp Thing, in Hell: “Demon…How…could God…allow such a place?Etrigan: Think you God built this place, wishing man ill and not lusts uncontrolled or swords unsheathed?Not God, my friend. The truth’s more hideous still: These halls...

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?

MEMORY’S SO TREACHEROUS. ONE MOMENT YOU’RE LOST IN A CARNIVAL OF DELIGHTS, WITH POIGNANT CHILDHOOD AROMAS, THE FLASHING NEON OF PUBERTY, ALL THAT SENTIMENTAL CANDY-FLOSS…THE NEXT, IT LEADS YOU SOMEWHERE YOU DON’T WANT TO GO……SOMEWHERE...

Some things are hard to imagine. Can you conceive of excessive contentment, for example? Or an over pleasant evening? Too much happiness?

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...

The disciplines of physical exercise, meditation and study aren’t terribly esoteric. The means to attain a capability far beyond that of the so-called ordinary person are within the reach of everyone, if their desire and...

… and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout: ‘Save us!’. And I’ll look down and whisper: ‘No.

And I’m thinking about the old man. He’ll be pounding on the glass right about now… or maybe not now. Maybe in a while. But he’ll be pounding and… will there be blood? I like...

Behind this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea… and ideas are bulletproof.

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

Consciousness, unprovable by scientific standards, is forever, then, the impossible phantom in the predictable biologic machine, and your every thought a genuine supernatural event. Your every thought is a ghost, dancing.

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

When the gap between the world of the city and the world my grandfather had presented to me as right and good became too wide and depressing to tolerate, I’d turn to my other great...

People’s lives take them strange places. They do strange things, and… well, sometimes they can’t talk about them.

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.

Does the human heart know chasms so abysmal?

There’s no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There’s only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.

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...

In the beginning was the Word.

They are bright and exciting. Like America. Like its women.

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.

People shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.

Look at him now, poor fellow. That’s what a dose of reality does for you…Never touch the stuff myself, you understand. Find it gets in the way of the hallucinations.

Reality, at first glance, is a simple thing: the television speaking to you now is real. Your body sunk into that chair in the approach to midnight, a clock ticking at the threshold of awareness....

Nite Owl II: But the country’s disintegrating. What’s happened to America? What’s happened to the American dream?The Comedian: It came true. You’re lookin’ at it.

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.

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...

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....

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.

Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.

All we ever see of stars are their old photographs.

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...

The past can’t hurt you anymore, not unless you let it.

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

Our masters have not heard the people’s voice for generations and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.

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...

I still can’t believe it . . . him comin’ here everyday, nobody realizin’. Still, that’s life: lotta stuff happens under the waterline.

Eve: All this riot and uproar, V… is this Anarchy? Is this the Land of Do-As-You-Please? V: No. This is only the land of take-what-you-want. Anarchy means “without leaders”, not “without order”. With anarchy comes...

We are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later.

Language comes first. It’s not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven’t got language, you can’t be conscious.

Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free.

Books require titles; reading them doesn’t

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...