ROBERT CRUMB

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

You can't make everybody love you. It's an exercise in futility, and it's probably not even a good idea to try.

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.

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.

There's many heroic underappreciated investigative journalists.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

Yeah, I was a child of American popular culture.