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

"Not thou alone, but all humanity doth in its progress fable emulate. Whence came thy rocket-ships and submarine if not from Nautilus, from Cavorite? Your trustiest companions since the cave, we apparitions guided mankind's tread, our planet, unseen counterpart to thine, as permanent, as ven'rable, as true. On dream's foundation matter's mudyards rest. Two sketching hands, each one the other draws: the fantasies thou've fashioned fashion thee."

"To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate - unlike most films."

"No matter how powerful our political and religious leaders think they are, they are as dust before the immense and implacable forces of history and progress. I just hope that they don't make too much of a mess or take too many more people down with them."

"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."

"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 their will are strong enough. I have studied science, art, religion and a hundred different philosophies. Anyone could do as much. By applying what you learn and ordering your thoughts in an intelligent manner it is possible to accomplish almost anything. Possible for an 'ordinary person.' There's a notion I'd like to see buried: the ordinary person. Ridiculous. There is no ordinary person."

"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. I am tired of Earth. These people. I am tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives."

"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."

"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 were carved by men while yet they breathed.God is no parent or policeman grim dispensing treats or punishments to all.Each soul climbs or descends by its own whim. He mourns, but He cannot prevent their fall.We suffer as we choose. Nothing's amiss. All torments are deserved..."

"War is a perversion of sex."

"Does the human heart know chasms so abysmal?"

"Are you like, a crazy person?I'm quite sure they will say so."

"The superman exists and he's American."

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

"The third and, given due consideration, most probable of all my theorems, is that life is ordered by the principles of some religion so peculiar and obscure it has no followers, and none may fathom it, nor know the rituals by which to court its favor."

"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 in modified visions of a half-imagines past."

"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."

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

"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 ten years later and you can see that there's a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again."

"Don't leave home without your sword - your intellect."

"To some degree Satanism is purely a kind of disease of Christianity. You've got to really be Christian to believe in Satan."

"Equality and freedom are not luxuries to lightly cast aside. Without them, order cannot long endure before approaching depths beyond imagining."

"It was as if life was one great big impersonal piece of machinery."

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

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

"How can two people hate so much without knowing each other?"

"I did it thirty-five minutes ago."

"In the sixties, for anybody to suggest that the government didn't have our best interests at heart and policemen sometimes killed people would have automatically made them a radical firebrand lefty. That's not the case anymore."

"The things that are most popular are usually rubbish, stand up for what's important, not popular."

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

"Evey Hammond: Who are you? V: Who? Who is but the form following the function of what and what I am is a man in a mask. Evey Hammond: Well I can see that. V: Of course you can. I'm not questioning your powers of observation I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is."

"My mother said I broke her heart...but it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, but it's all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us...but within that inch we are free."

"Authority, when first detecting chaos at its heels, will entertain the vilest schemes to save its orderly facade."

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

"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."

"I suppose all fictional characters, especially in adventure or heroic fiction, at the end of the day are our dreams about ourselves. And sometimes they can be really revealing."

"Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world."

"If gods are transcendent ideas, then the idea of a god IS a god."

"It does not do to rely too much on silent majorities, Evey, for silence is a fragile thing, one loud noise, and its gone. But the people are so cowed and disorganised. A few might take the opportunity to protest, but it'll just be a voice crying in the wilderness. Noise is relative to the silence preceding it. The more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap. Our masters have not heard the people's voice for generations, Evey and it is much, much louder than they care to remember."

"Dan, I'm not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago."

"I'm not a particularly dark individual. I have my moments, it's true, but I do have a sense of humor."

"I'm 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time."

"I am not man so much as syndrome, as a voice that bellows in the human heart.I am rain.I cannot be contained."

"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."

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

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

"Perhaps this is the purpose of all art, all writing, on the murders, fiction and non-fiction: Simply to participate."

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

"Rome sees some bloke from the London School of Economics on the telly while he's flicking through the channels. This chap makes the point that governments don't actually do anything for us. The only thing that makes them boss is that they control all the currency. Historically, anyone proposing an alternative to cash is brutally suppressed, but then historically they haven't got the Internet, which makes such things much easier to set up; much harder to crack down on."

"Knowledge, like air, is vital to life. Like air, no one should be denied it."