Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Your vigor for life appalls me.
I'm an outsider. I will always be an outsider.
Yeah, I was a child of American popular culture.
At least I hate myself as much as I hate anybody else.
When I come up against the real world, I just vacillate.
Everything that is strong in me has gone into my art work.
The fine-art world knows very little about the cartoon world.
Most of my adult life I had this towering contempt for America.
There's many heroic underappreciated investigative journalists.
I guess I didn't enjoy drawing very much. It was like homework.
The comics are where all the crazy subconscious stuff comes out.
The only burning passion I'm sure I have is the passion for sex.
The only burning passion I'm sure I have, is the passion for sex.
I have always had an abiding interest in that type of female anatomy.
Throwaway pens are no good - I never liked them. I've tried them all.
Drawing is a way for me to articulate things inside myself that I can't otherwise grasp.
I'm just a negative person, a deeply negative person. I see the worst aspects of everything.
Violence begets violence, and then you get leaders who are violent men. And you don't want that.
I don't do album covers or CD covers for groups or musicians I don't like or have no interest in.
Hey kids, while you're out smashing the state keep a smile on your lips and a song in your hearts.
When I listen to old music, that's one of the few times that I actually have a kind of love for humanity.
I use photos a lot for drawing people and personalities, but they're almost never photos that I've taken.
I felt so painfully isolated that I vowed I would get revenge on the world by becoming a famous cartoonist.
You can't make everybody love you. It's an exercise in futility, and it's probably not even a good idea to try.
You don't have to be a Fundamentalist Christian to be interested in the Bible. It's really a fascinating mythology.
The Bible was not written for entertainment purposes, so it's a real hodgepodge and a compendium of all kinds of stuff.
The French hold onto their traditions. I was always so alienated in America. My work was this constant reaction to that.
I lose patience with long stories. I get people who go, "Crumb, do some long stories, do a graphic novel." Novel-schmovel.
The work itself is what motivates me. I like my own stuff, you know? I like the way it looks. I do it to please myself first.
I didn't invent anything; it's all there in the culture; it's not a big mystery. I just combine my personal experience with classic cartoon stereotypes.
I use the old Strathmore vellum surface paper, which is the best paper you can get in the Western world for ink line drawing. It has a good, hard surface.
People still make me nervous, but gradually over the years I've developed kind of like a public personality, so I can talk. I have my spiel, I have my stories.
In the fall of 1968, I became attractive to women. One day I was an ignored schlub in the street, then suddenly all these good-looking women were interested in me.
You must thank the gods for art, those of us who have been fortunate enough to stumble onto this means of venting our craziness, our meanness, our towering disgust.
When people say 'What are underground comics?' I think the best way you can define them is just the absolute freedom involved... we didn't have anyone standing over us.
I oughta be rich. But, you know, if you don't spend all your time looking after money, somebody else will. The guys who look after money, they're the ones who get the money.
We were always drawing comics as kids. My brother Charles made me draw comics. I was very much under his domination. He was actually a much stronger artistic visionary than I was.
I knew I was weird by the time I was four. I knew I wasn't like other boys. I knew I was more fearful. I didn't like the rough and tumble most boys were into. I knew I was a sissy.
They can buy talent. You can't buy it for yourself, but you can buy other people's talent to serve your purposes. And once an artist does that, he becomes like a plaything of the rich.
I would call myself a Gnostic. Which means, I'm interested in pursuing and understanding the spiritual nature of things. A Gnostic is somebody seeking knowledge of that aspect of reality.
If you're trying to work the art game, if you're like Andy Warhol or something, then you're in with cake-eaters of society. You want to get in with them and please them and get their money.
Oh, yes. I knew I was weird by the time I was four. I knew I wasn't like other boys. I knew I was more fearful. I didn't like the rough and tumble most boys were into. I knew I was a sissy.
Killing yourself is a major commitment, it takes a kind of courage. Most people just lead lives of cowardly desperation. It's kinda half suicide where you just dull yourself with substances.
There's some connection between visual images and music. But there's plenty of old records where I have no idea what the band looked like, or even what sort of context the music was played in.
I moved further and further away from mass entertainment. The sexual element became increasingly sinister and bizarre. Don't blame me! The bastards drove me to it! They all backed off after that!
Pictures have a lot more power than text. Text is just a bunch of little symbols. You have to actually read it and imagine it, and even that can be censored. With pictures, it's a lot more immediate.
I still can't spend a lot of money on records at collector prices. There's something in me that just won't allow me to do that. But I will trade my artwork, which I know is worth thousands of dollars.
I always had a sketchbook with me when I was young. I was hiding behind it, basically, hiding behind drawing because I couldn't cope with people in real life; I was very shy and very nervous around people.
I was a child of American popular culture. All I did as a kid was what I could get at the local supermarket or the dime store. Nothing else was seen. Plus what was on television, or the movie theatre. That was it.
In my midteens I went through a brief stage of religious fanaticism, but it was very much about just saying prayers and stuff like that, reciting rosaries and spending a lot of time on that kind of Catholic ritual.