Top 30 Harvey Pekar Quotes

I worry about getting work, and then when I get it, I worry about doing it well. I don’t want to just go through the motions and give people stuff. This stuff is really important to me.

I write about my life, choosing incidents that I think will be, for one reason or another, significant to people. Often because they may have experienced the same things.

I can’t write in a whole lot of different styles, trying to please the highbrows one time and the lowbrows the next. I pretty much have a basic style I employ.

My work looks like a comic book in form, but it’s not a typical comic book in content. I write autobiographical stuff.

Even a pretty traditional comic book writer can make valuable contributions to the Internet.

I decided I was going to tell these stories. I went around and met Crumb. He was the cartoonist. I started realizing comics weren’t just kid stuff.

I’m doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys – Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys.

I think you can do anything with comics that you could do in just about any art form.

I’ve probably had my day in the sun. I think I’ve influenced a lot of comic book writers.

I was 16 years old, and I was just flailing around, looking for an interest. I heard, you know, these jazz records. They were modern records, at the time in the ’50s, and I realized that I didn’t fully get what was going on. But I liked a lot of what I heard.

Israel’s creation was politically amazing and caused by a number of unusual events. And I understand. For centuries, Jews endured horrible suffering, and like other people, deserve the right to self-determination, but the way Israel is going now frightens me. Jews make awkward colonial overlords.

I’m always shook up and nervous and I’ve got the hospital record to prove it.

I’ve gotten more and more cut off from the regular comic-book world, from straight comics and stuff like that. Once in a while, I’ll take a look at something.

I think the people who would be the least interested in my work would be people who read lots of comic books.

It makes you feel good to know that there’s other people afflicted like you.

Everybody’s like everybody else, and everybody’s different from everybody else.

I’d been familiar with comics, and I’d collected ’em when I was a kid, but after I got into junior high school, there wasn’t much I was interested in.

There’s no limitation on comics, nothing. From a logical standpoint, how can there be a limitation on comics? You can use any word in the dictionary. You can put them in any order you want to. You can use a vast variety of illustrating styles. People could do all sorts of things.

I’m kind of concerned about ‘Ego & Hubris’ because I’m thinking that people will read it and maybe even be entertained by it, but at the end of it, you know, they’ll wonder, ‘Why did this guy write this? What was the point of it?’

I don’t mind if I show myself being cheap or unreasonable sometimes.

People writing about me have said that I’ve influenced a lot of people, and there are some artists who have credited me with influencing them.

It seemed to me you could do anything in comics. So I started doing my thing, which is mainly influenced by novelists, stand-up comedians, that sort of thing.

I write scripts in storyboard fashion using stick figures, and thought balloons and word balloons and captions. Then I’ll write descriptions of what scenes should look like and turn it over to the artist.

I came up with American Splendor. Some people think it’s American Squalor.

I don’t write about certain arguments I have with my wife. I’d get my head torn off if wrote about certain things.

I’ve just been writing stuff down as it comes to me. I haven’t thought, ‘Let me write some major opus here.’

I really don’t have a lot in common with the people who attend the Comic Con. It’s like assuming that all people who write prose are the same.

Of course I don’t think I have it made by any means. I’m too insecure, obsessive and paranoid for that.

I don’t want to play myself up as a hero, because it would make me unbelievable. I’d rather settle for people thinking that I’m a bum, but digging my stories, than liking me and not being able to believe in my stories. That’s one reason I’ve been hard on myself, because I want my stuff to be believable.

You can find heroism everyday, like guys working terrible jobs because they’ve got to support their families. Or as far as humor, the things I see on the job, on the street, are far funnier than anything you’ll ever see on TV.