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.
Alan MooreRead
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.
Interpretation
Fictional characters reflect our deepest aspirations and dreams about who we are.
This quote by Alan Moore suggests that the characters we create in fiction, especially those found in adventure and heroic stories, are more than just creations; they are expressions of our own inner desires and identities. By examining these characters, we may uncover insights about ourselves, our hopes, and the qualities we aspire to embody, making them an essential part of our understanding of human nature and creativity.
In practice
In a discussion about storytelling in a creative writing workshop.
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.
The only reality we can ever truly know is that of our perceptions, our own consciousness, while that consciousness, and thus our entire reality, is made of nothing but signs and symbols. Nothing but language. Even God requires language before conceiving the Universe. See Genesis: βIn the beginning was the Word.
My main point about films is that I don't like the adaptation process, and I particularly don't like the modern way of comic book-film adaptations, where, essentially, the central characters are just franchises that can be worked endlessly to no apparent point.
The magician to some degree is trying to drive him or herself mad in a controlled setting, within controlled laws.
When I was working upon the ABC books, I wanted to show different ways that mainstream comics could viably have gone, that they didn't have to follow 'Watchmen' and the other 1980s books down this relentlessly dark route. It was never my intention to start a trend for darkness. I'm not a particularly dark individual.
Love your rage, not your cage.
If we look at the works of JS Bach ... on each page we discover things which we thought were born only yesterday, from delightful arabesques to an overflowing of religious feeling greater than anything we have since discovered.
In my experience, as a young black artist, you have to fulfill an archetype, or be a token - and I was unwilling to do that.
Where I grew up, in Aldgate, east London, one of the poorest boroughs in the country, I saw lots that was real - the bankers with their briefcases, the man next door with five wives, the illegal immigrants in Flat 5. I'm from a world you rarely see on screen, and I want to show it off.
A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.
Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me "weak" or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life...If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.
Tea is a work of art and needs a master hand to bring out its noblest qualities. We have good and bad teas, as we have good and bad paintings - generally the latter.
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