Some excerpts from a recent interview with Alan Moore:

On Magic:

“My understanding of magic has evolved massively over the thirty-three years since I commenced my study and practice. For one thing, I have come to understand that magic and the arts, particularly writing, are to all intents and purposes synonymous. Thus, while magic is the way in which I see the world and therefore affects every area of my life, nowhere is this more true than in my writing. Indeed, these days, writing is pretty much my only form of magical expression. My guess is that this, writing being the most powerful instrument of magic, has been true for most self-identified magicians – and what other kind is there? – since the dawn of human consciousness.”

On Comics:

“What first attracted me to the comics field was that it was ignored by culture and regarded as a trash medium suitable only for children or the working classes. It was cheaply mass produced, with tens or hundreds of thousands of copies distributed each month or week, and it seemed to me that in the right hands, comics could become a field where useful, powerful, potentially liberating ideas, represented in an attractive and engaging form, could be transmitted to young or poor people throughout society, quickly and captivatingly, to the people in society who most need those ideas.

So, that was what I’d hoped the comics industry might become, rather than, predominately, a medium that has priced itself beyond the reach of children or the poor, and which seems to be, even in its more worthy examples, a field that is generating product largely by, for and about middle-class people. Nothing against middle-class people, of course. It’s simply that the comic strip form was originally conceived as by, for and about the working classes, who were its audience and, for my money, its very best creators. That is the comics field I’d like to see, brimming with new ideas and available to everyone, but, realistically, I don’t imagine that is ever going to happen, so I’ve chosen to put my remaining energies elsewhere.”

On Nostalgia:

“[Nostalgia’s] probably a reliable commercial tool, however, in that as the world becomes more complex and overwhelming, more and more people seem to be retreating from their responsibility to help create a tolerable present by seeking refuge in an imagined idyllic past or in their own childhoods, when they felt safe and happy and as if they understood things. Nostalgia is, and always has been since the word was first coined, an illness. It literally means ‘homesickness’, but in effect refers to all of our yearnings for a world that, with our serial view of time, we feel we have inevitably and irrecoverably lost.”

On Art:

“Of course art can still change the collective consciousness. That is art’s only true function, and it is the thing that art, humanity’s most glorious technology, has been steadily improving and developing itself to do, almost since our inception as a species.”

— (via)

“Computers have allowed students to go straight to step two: execution. But too many of them have no idea of step one: thinking. Sketching and drawing are important tools for a designer. It is a way of training your mind. It is like learning to play a sport, but not having any hand-eye coordination you will go through the motions of something that looks like a sport, or be very technical about it, but not actually be very good at it. I see soooo much work out there that is done by designers who can’t draw. You can tell. And what’s worse, real human beings can tell. They sense it without knowing. They feel it. This kind of work robs us of our daily beauty. Designers make art for the street, whether they own up to that responsibility or not. And drawing is the basis of it all. Always has been.”

— James Victore

“It is not hard to stand behind one’s successes. But to accept responsibility for one’s failures, to accept them unreservedly as failures that are truly one’s own, that cannot be shifted somewhere else or onto something else, and actively to accept — without regard for any worldly interests, no matter how well disguised, or for well-meant advice — the price that has to be paid for it: that is devilishly hard! But only thence does the road lead — as my experience, I hope, has persuaded me — to the renewal of sovereignty over my own affairs, to a radically new insight into the mysterious gravity of my existence as an uncertain enterprise, and to its transcendental meaning. And only this kind of inner understanding can ultimately lead to what might be called true ‘peace of mind’…”

— Václav Havel

“I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship, or the sale of goods through pretending that they sell, or power through making believe you are powerful, or through a packed jury or caucus, bribery and “repeating” votes, or wealth by fraud. They think they have got it, but they have got something else, — a crime which calls for another crime, and another devil behind that; these are steps to suicide, infamy and the harming of mankind. We countenance each other in this life of show, puffing, advertisement and manufacture of public opinion; and excellence is lost sight of in the hunger for sudden performance and praise.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hannah Einbinder on AI:

“The people who make this stuff are losers. They’re not artists. They’re not creative. And they’ve wanted their whole lives to be special. And they’re not special. They’re trying to rob real creative people of our gifts. And you can’t. And even if you try, you will never be cool. You guys suck. No one likes you. Anyone who’s near you is because they crave power and access over any ethical standard. You are a loser. You will never be cool. And you probably had a rolly backpack in high school. I wanna put your head in the toilet and flush.”

— (via)

“Love and Rockets is the last step. I ‘made it’ when we did the first issue. Everything else – The New York Times, even making a movie – is lesser than Love and Rockets, as far as I’m concerned, and everyone else should treat their [own] work that way.”

— Jaime Hernandez

“Human beings appear to be the only mortal finite beings who wish to transcend their finitude. Thus they are the only emotional beings who wish not to be emotional, who wish to withhold these acknowledgments of neediness and to design for themselves a life in which these acknowledgments have no place. This means that they frequently learn to reject their own vulnerability and to suppress awareness of the attachments that entail it. We might also say that they are the only animals for whom neediness is a source of shame, and who take pride in themselves to the extent to which they have allegedly gotten clear of vulnerability.”

— Martha Nussbaum

“I condemn and deplore the violence of poverty and the injustice of hatred and the violence of absolute injustice that makes the peaceful conduct of our days impossible or cowardly.”

— June Jordan