London has been used as the emblematic English city, but it’s far from representative of what life in England is actually about.
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.
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.
There’s no such thing as quitting. Just sometimes there’s a longer pause between relapses.
On my fortieth birthday, rather than merely bore my friends by having anything as mundane as a midlife crisis I decided it might be more interesting to actually terrify them by going completely mad and declaring myself to be a magician.
Truly, whoever we are, wherever we reside, we exist upon the whim of murderers.
One of the advantages of travelling the world is that you get to know the world broadly. And one of the advantages of staying in one place is that you get to know the world deeply.
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.
Authority, when first detecting chaos at its heels, will entertain the vilest schemes to save its orderly facade.
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.
Authority allows two roles: the torturer and the tortured. Twists people into joyless mannequins that fear and hate, while culture plunges into the abyss.
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.
In a sense, the story, or poem or verse or whatever it is you’re writing, you can kind of think of it as a kind of projectile. Imagine it is a kind of projectile which has been specially shaped to be aerodynamic, and that your target is the soft grey putty of the reader’s brain.
Don’t leave home without your sword – your intellect.
What does fighting crime mean, exactly? Does it mean upholding the law when a woman shoplifts to feed her children, or does it mean struggling to uncover the ones who, quite legally, have brought about her poverty?
To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate – unlike most films.
Love doesn’t have a point. Love is the point.
Once a man has seen society’s black underbelly, he can never turn his back on it. Never pretend, like you do, that it doesn’t exist.
Nothing is insoluble. Nothing is hopeless. Not while there’s life.
My dear, beautiful and imaginative things can be destroyed. Beauty and imagination cannot.