Writer

It has occurred to me that the superhero really only originates in America. That seems to be the only country that has produced this phenomenon.

All culture must have arisen from cult.

Money's fine if it enables you to enjoy your life and to be useful to other people. But as something that is a means to an end, no, it's useless.

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.

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.

I'm dependent on writing for a living, so really it's to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you're going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality.

Every film is a remake of a previous film, or a remake of a television series that everyone loved in the 1960s, or a remake of a television series that everyone hated in the 1960s. Or it's a theme park ride; it will soon come to breakfast cereal mascots.

I think there's always been a traditionally apocalyptic side to British science fiction, from H.G. Wells onwards. I mean, most of Wells' stories are potentially apocalyptic in some sense or another.

One of the reasons why I don't leave Northampton is that the people don't treat me like a celebrity. I've been here for years; I'm just that bloke with long hair.

Here's the thing: If you're monitoring every single thing that goes on in a given culture, if you have all the information that is there to be had, then that is the equivalent of having none of it. How are you going to process that amount of information?

I didn't really sign up to be a celebrity, I only signed up to be a writer.

Art makes us feel less alone. It makes us think: somebody else has thought this, somebody else has had these feelings.

In comics the reader is in complete control of the experience. They can read it at their own pace, and if there's a piece of dialogue that seems to echo something a few pages back, they can flip back and check it out, whereas the audience for a film is being dragged through the experience at the speed of 24 frames per second.

I've never watched any of the adaptations of my books. I've never wanted to, and there's absolutely no chance of me doing so in the future.

Right from the outset, the prevailing mindset in British comics fandom was a radical and progressive one. We were all proto-hippies, and we all thought that comics would be greatly improved if everything was a bit psychedelic like Jim Steranko.

If you give me a typewriter and I'm having a good day, I can write a scene that will astonish its readers. That will perhaps make them laugh, perhaps make them cry - that will have some emotional clout to it. It doesn't cost much to do that.

It is my belief that all gods are stories, or at least the ideas behind stories, but stories or ideas that have become in some way almost alive and aware.

I increasingly fear that nothing good can come of almost any adaptation, and obviously that's sweeping. There are a couple of adaptations that are perhaps as good or better than the original work. But the vast majority of them are pointless.

I try to do things in comics that cannot be repeated by television, by movies, by interactive entertainment.

War never accomplishes anything. It's never going to look good in the history books. People are never going to look back and think, 'He started a lot of wars; what a great leader he was!' That's not the way it works. God knows how many more of these things we're going to need before it starts to sink in.