Robert Crumb Quotations

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

I was raised Catholic and I went to church until I was 16. I went through a phase when I was 15 of being quite fanatically Catholic. I was going to church a lot, receiving communion, saying the Rosary, praying, all that stuff. But when I started scrutinizing it, it just fell apart so quickly.

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!

I'm into old-time music, I'm not very interested in modern, popular music at all. And if I'm really into some particular old-time musician, some fiddler or banjo player, I'm always dying of curiosity to see what they look like.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some things I won't do for any amount of money. Like for instance, there's a couple of CEOs of very large corporations that offered me lots of money to do special pictures for them. And I just refused to do that. Even if it was a million dollars I wouldn't do it.

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.

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.

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.

If I didn't draw comics I was a worthless human being. It was tedious labor, so I worked fast to get it over with.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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. )

There's many heroic underappreciated investigative journalists.

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

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

Your vigor for life appalls me.

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.

Yeah, I was a child of American popular culture.

Some of the wealthy collectors have paid lots of money for artwork that I already did, but I didn't do it with the intention of catering to them. I think part of the reason my work is attractive to people like that is because it doesn't cater to them.

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

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

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

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.

As a kid growing up in the 1950s I became acutely aware of the changes taking place in American culture and I must say I didn't much like it. I witnessed the debasement of architecture, and I could see a decline in the quality of things like comic books and toys, things made for kids. Old things seemed to have more life, more substance, more humanity in them.

I draw the line at some things. Some things I won't do for any amount of money. Like for instance, there's a couple of CEOs of very large corporations that offered me lots of money to do special pictures for them. And I just refused to do that. Even if it was a million dollars I wouldn't do it.

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

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.