Robert Crumb Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

Hell is yourself too.

Yeah, I was a child of American popular culture.

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

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

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.

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

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

I have always had an abiding interest in that type of female anatomy.

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.

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

With comics, you've got to develop some kind of shorthand. You can't make every drawing look like a detailed etching. The average reader actually doesn't want all that detail; it interferes with the flow of the reading process.

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.

The only burning passion I'm sure I have, is the passion for sex.

You don't have to be a Fundamentalist Christian to be interested in the Bible. It's really a fascinating mythology.

When I was younger, I just lived my life on paper. I didn't really live in the real world very much. As a consequence, I couldn't cope with the real world and real people very well. That in itself became life threatening, so I had to stop drawing so much and learn how to cope with people.

You don't have journalists over there anymore, what they have is public relations people. That's what they have over in America now. Two-hundred and fifty thousand people in public relations. And a dwindling number of actual reporters and journalists.

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 do covers for CDs and LPs of music that I like, reissues of old-time music, and then I'm inspired to make some kind of drawing based on this love of the music. I don't do album covers or CD covers for groups or musicians I don't like or have no interest in.

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

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

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.

I felt so painfully isolated that I vowed I would get revenge on the world by becoming a famous cartoonist.

I couldn't find any good pictures in magazines of ordinary modern street corners in America, so I persuaded this guy I knew in Sacramento - Stanley Something-or-other - to spend a day with me driving around just to take snapshots.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Your vigor for life appalls me.

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

They were just snapshots, nothing special, nothing particularly artistic. They were used for utility purposes. (On photographs of mundane streetscapes he had Stanley Something-or-other take in Sacramento in 1988 to serve as backgrounds to his cartoons. People don't draw it, all this crap, people don't focus attention on it because it's ugly, it's bleak, it's depressing ... But, this is the world we live in; I wanted my work to reflect that, the background reality of urban life. )

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 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'm such a negative person, and always have been. Was I born that way? I don't know. I am constantly disgusted by reality, horrified and afraid. I cling desperately to the few things that give me some solace, that make me feel good.

I hate most of humanity. Though I might be very fond of particular individuals, humanity in general fills me with contempt and despair. I hate most of what passes for civilization. I hate the modern world. For one thing there are just too Goddamn many people. I hate the hordes, the crowds in their vast cities, with all their hateful vehicles, their noise and their constant meaningless comings and goings. I hate cars. I hate modern architecture. Every building built after 1955 should be torn down!

I despise modern music. Words cannot express how much it gets on my nerves – the false, pretentious, smug assertiveness of it. I hate business, having to deal with money. Money is one of the most hateful inventions of the human race. I hate the commodity culture, in which everything is bought and sold. No stone is left unturned. I hate the mass media, and how passively people suck up to it.

I hate having to get up in the morning and face another day of this insanity. I hate having to eat, shit, maintain the body – I hate my body. The thought of my internal functions, the organs, digestion, the brain, the nervous system, horrify me.

Nature is horrible. It's not cute and loveable. It's kill or be killed. It's very

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

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

All I can say is, it's a good thing we didn't win the revolution [laughter]. We would've ended up with people like Abie Hoffman and Eldridge Cleaver at the helm; we would've been in big trouble. Big trouble. It would've been such a Stalinist purge ... All those people that were the top names in those movements back then were all egotistical assholes, it turned out, every single one of them [laughter].

When I go back to America, after a few days I am once again filled with this kind of angry alienation and disgust with this thing there that America has got - you have no idea how pervasive it is there. The public relations and propaganda put out by the corporate mono-culture there is so pervasive.

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.