The extraordinary gentleman
He describes his politics as anarchist. "To me that means 'no leaders', and there are certain conditions which derive from that. If you've got no leaders, that means everyone has to be their own leader. They have to take complete responsibility for themselves and their actions. To do this after a few thousand years of having your actions subsumed within the state would be very difficult. You'd have to educate people so they were brave enough to actually take responsibility for their lives."
Moore also worships a snake god called Glycon and practises magic.
"When I was 40 I didn't fancy having a dreary midlife crisis like everyone else. I thought it would be better to go spectacularly mad in some creative way. As a writer I felt I'd pretty much reached the end of the road and that a rational approach to my writing had taken me about as far as I could go. I decided I would take a step beyond the boundaries of rationality and become a magician."
He talks about the Elizabethan polymath John Dee, an astronomer and astrologer who "spent most of his life staring in a black mirror talking to peculiar entities he described as angels".
"I couldn't dismiss Dee. He was an intellectual giant. You don't have to credit that gods are real, but I contend that the god experience is real."
Moore's recent output includes Fashion Beast, a comic adapted by Antony Johnson from an old film script Moore devised with late punk Svengali Malcolm McLaren, of whom he speaks fondly; and aexcellent new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book, Nemo: Heart of Ice, with the artist Kevin O'Neill.
He is writing another book in that series and is finishing his second novel, Jerusalem.
"I've just decided the 33rd chapter is going to be in verse. It's all about a specific place in Northampton," he says.
'Northampton born inbred'
He's rooted there - his rakish greatgrandfather, Ginger Vernon, traded caricatures for booze in local pubs, for example.
"Northampton born inbred, as I'm fond of saying. My family has been here for two or three generations, probably longer. I don't travel much. I haven't even got a passport. I'm not really interested in going overseas. I'm a misery on other people's holidays, always wishing I was at home working. I have everything I need here."
He's fascinated by Guy Debord's notion of psychogeography - the emotional and behavioural effects of the geographical environment - and loves location-obsessed writers such as John Bunyan, William Blake, JG Ballard and HP Lovecraft ("although he was probably more psycho than geographer").
"I'm starting to think that there are few things more important than location. These streets are where we live our lives. If we see them as being empty, grey blocks devoid of significance and meaning, then we the inhabitants are also devoid of significance and meaning. We internalise that.
"If you feel you live in ghastly rat runs, you come to the conclusion that you're a rat. Whereas if you have some kind of poetic understanding or historic understanding of the place where you're standing it becomes so much richer. It becomes a landscape out of the Arabian Nights, full of fable, full of information that charges and informs the streets you walk down each day.
"If you think you are living in a fabulous landscape you might come to the conclusion that you are a fabulous being. It's a way of setting your landscape on fire and making it blaze with meaning."
Nemo: Heart of Ice is published by Knockabout Comics
