Molly Crabapple Quotes

Different types of sex work are differently supportive. If I were working in a strip club, I would be competing with my colleagues, and while there would be support, there would be financial motivation not to offer too much support.

Radicals often suspect beauty of corruption. Uptight fuckers though they sometimes are, they're right in one thing: art alone cannot change the world. Pens can't take on swords, let alone Predator drones. But as disappointment and violence spread, the antidote is a generosity that the best art can still inspire.

Art is hope against cynicism, creation against entropy. To make art is an act of both love and defiance. Though I'm a cynic, I believe these things are all we have.

We clung to each other, as bookish young people often do, while waiting out the years until our real lives could begin. At

I was involved in Occupy Wall Street as a participant and poster artist. 'Shell Game' is an attempt to do something bigger, to use whatever artistic powers I have to explore the excitements and betrayals of that year.

I've just found the stories of the people I'm talking to much more interesting than my reactions to them.

I grew up in Far Rockaway and then Long Island.

When you're an outsider, you don't have loyalties to anyone, so you can be cruelly honest if need be. The more you get inside, the more you are involved in polite networks of professional coercion that make people less honest.

Objectifying is kind of a funny thing. Art is objectification, all art, because you're taking someone and making them into an object. But people can also talk back more to you when you're sketching them. They can look at you and say, 'Oh man, you got me wrong.'

I'm an artist and a journalist. I travel around the world very often for 'Vice Magazine,' and I draw and I write about prisons, about conflict zones.

Art is much more confined by materials than writing is.

Why did we sleep together, dubiously queer girls that we were? Desire is fluid, but I think Jen and I fucked each other because we wanted to stand by ourselves. Were we not sweet enough for men? Were they put off by our ambition, how fast we talked, how needy we grew? We wouldn't contort ourselves for their desires. Our faces were the same size as we kissed. We were equals. We needed no masculine protection. We would protect each other. We could protect ourselves.

New York makes me swoony and in love. The New York of the 1880s was a place where black eye fixers did a brisk business and people were routinely killed for their shoes. But, the constant aspiration of the city never changes.

To make someone love you, see them as the person they want to be.

Art is for the elite because it has a very high price-point of entry. And when one is in that social strata, they look down at illustrators because they just draw things directly for a few hundred dollars, and that's seen as being a bit grubby. Galleries allow artists to stay relatively divorced from the financial aspects of their trade.

When I started my own business, I funded it as a naked model. I still think that the sex industry can, for some men and women, be a powerful tool for improving their financial prospects.

I'm only the third artist who's ever drawn at Gitmo.

Sketching is like dancing. It's process as much as product. You can turn your head off and just sort of dissolve into the now. Doing a giant, super thought-out painting is the opposite of that.

The occupation is really terrible on a variety of levels. It's terrible on the "shooting people and torturing people in prison" level. But I think the thing that is very hard to convey is that it's also this bureaucratic grinding-down and daily humiliation that I think would probably be as horrible as the spectacular violence.

Working as a model liberated me from ever having to hold a day job. I transitioned from doing that to working full-time as an artist. If you're 19 and living cheap, being an artist model can sustain you.

When you hold a graphic novel in your hands, you're holding artist blood made ink.

Neutrality and boredom are the weapons of the state.

The main difference between illustration and comics is that comics are much, much more work. Every comics page is the equivalent of six to nine illustrations.

Rejection is inevitable. Let it hit you hard for a moment, feel the hurt, and then move on.

A woman's beauty is supposed to be her grand project and constant insecurity. We're meant to shellac our lips with five different glosses, but always think we're fat. Beauty is Zeno's paradox. We should endlessly strive for it, but it's not socially acceptable to admit we're there. We can't perceive it in ourselves. It belongs to the guy screaming 'nice tits.

Burlesque girls were alchemists. They were steel-tough performers who were willing to use kitchens as dressing rooms, haul their costume bags through the snow, and go into debt over fake diamonds, all for the five minutes onstage when they were goddesses.

My real name - my real name is Jennifer Caban.

I absorbed the lie that any smart woman would use birth control and be responsible for her body. Obviously that's not true.

I forced myself to comply. When the media reports that a suspect in custody was killed after resisting arrest, they never tell you how hard it is to assist passively with your own kidnapping. They never talk about the discipline it takes to submit.

I travel so much that when I'm not traveling, I'm just kind of curled up in a ball here, not wanting to leave or see anyone.

Globalism has less leeway for a poor country's brilliant sons.

A lot of things sound neutral, but they're not. A typical example would involve police violence. It's usually forbidden to call police "murderers," even if they're convicted of murder. People will say that it sounds hysterical and unobjective.

Historically, the women who have been the great painters of the canon have very often have been the wives or daughters of supportive men. Like Artemisia, whose father was a very established painter. I will say that the two current contemporary artists I admire the most are women: Kara Walker and Swoon.

I'm an artist, and I love the visual. Fashion is high art sometimes and hack work other times, but it's something worthy of study and love.

The first time I made any money, I was 27. I went to Bergdorf's looking like a proper guttersnipe and bought a pair of Louboutins. I'd wear them and an old ink-stained kimono and make my drawings and feel indomitable.

You're demonstrating your own skills in a vulnerable way when you draw.

I am lucky because I do fine art, and that is half of my living. And then illustration provides the other half.

The problem with doing physically ambitious art is that to view it, you still have to be in your physical body.

Sketching in general - anywhere, not just in Gitmo, but in life, in the world - is a profoundly disruptive act. Because you're creating something when you're kind of expected to consume or sit passively. I've always sketched things as a way to get into them, whether it was a fancy nightclub or, you know, to have kids think I was cool, whatever.