The question that everybody asks writers is: ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ It seems like a banal question, but it’s the only important question: where do ideas come from? For me, getting into magic was just a way of answering that.

First, there’s nothing there, and then there’s a vague unformed idea in the mind of the artist or writer. Then the idea takes on a little more form, and then, suddenly, it’s a finished script or a finished drawing. Something has come into being out of nothing. It’s the rabbit from the hat. That to me is the definition of magic. It covers a lot of other ground in that everything anyone has ever said about magic is true, it’s a very rich landscape to explore and it certainly has an effect in some way or another on everything that I do.

–Alan Moore