Words matter. These are the best Robert Crumb Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
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 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.
Yeah, I was a child of American popular culture.
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!
Most of my adult life I had this towering contempt for America.
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. So there’s some connection between visual images and music.
I guess I didn’t enjoy drawing very much. It was like homework.
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.
The fine-art world knows very little about the cartoon world.
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.
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 come up against the real world, I just vacillate.
There’s many heroic underappreciated investigative journalists.
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.
The comics are where all the crazy subconscious stuff comes out.
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.
Everything that is strong in me has gone into my art work.
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 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.
The only burning passion I’m sure I have, is the passion for sex.
The Bible was not written for entertainment purposes, so it’s a real hodgepodge and a compendium of all kinds of stuff.
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.
