Robert Crumb Quotes

At least I hate myself as much as I hate anybody else.

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.

When I come up against the real world, I just vacillate.

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.

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.

When I listen to old music, that's one of the few times that I actually have a kind of love for humanity.

Drawing is a way for me to articulate things inside myself that I can't otherwise grasp.

Hey kids, while you're out smashing the state keep a smile on your lips and a song in your hearts.

Your vigor for life appalls me.

I'm just a negative person, a deeply negative person. I see the worst aspects of everything.

I lose patience with long stories. I get people who go, "Crumb, do some long stories, do a graphic novel." Novel-schmovel.

Most of my adult life I had this towering contempt for America.

The Bible was not written for entertainment purposes, so it's a real hodgepodge and a compendium of all kinds of stuff.

Everything that is strong in me has gone into my art work.

I guess I didn't enjoy drawing very much. It was like homework.

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.

Violence begets violence, and then you get leaders who are violent men. And you don't want that.

The comics are where all the crazy subconscious stuff comes out.

I'm an outsider. I will always be an outsider.

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.

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.

The fine-art world knows very little about the cartoon world.

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 don't do album covers or CD covers for groups or musicians I don't like or have no interest in.

Throwaway pens are no good - I never liked them. I've tried them all.

There's many heroic underappreciated investigative journalists.

I use photos a lot for drawing people and personalities, but they're almost never photos that I've taken.

Yeah, I was a child of American popular culture.

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.

The French hold onto their traditions. I was always so alienated in America. My work was this constant reaction to that.

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.