Robert Crumb Quotes

When you're writing songs for yourself, as all artists do, it's about 'me.' It's about what you feel and your emotions. You're trying to get something out of your system about your experiences.

For me it's very important to express my thoughts, the pictures I carry inside of me, maybe because it's important to get them out.

I tend to write it and then let go emotionally.

All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.

I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.

I like to draw, and my drawings are what yell and scream for me.

I make art to figure out what I'm thinking, not to tell people what I think.

I wasn't quite used to writing a diary - I didn't understand why people did it - but I wrote down notes and they went into a poem.

My poetry has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.

When I was young, there was never any space for me to get attention of my own that wasn't negative. Art, and the practice of making art, was the only space that was mine alone, where I could be anyone and do anything, where just by using my head and my hands I could cry, or laugh, or get pissed off.

All my songs are where I am.

Music is about expressing things you can't in everyday life.

Thank God for being a writer, because you do sort of find out what you think by the process of writing.

For me, how I feel about what I wrote down turns into a song.

When I look at the majority of my own songs they really came from my own sense of personal confusion or need to express some pain or beauty - they were coming from a universal and personal place.

For me, poetry was... the fastest way to express what I was feeling, what I was going through.

The spirit can assert itself only through the medium of clear form.

I'm pretty terrible at writing, so the way I kind of therapeutically get through things is by drawing.

I was trying to be a writer, and I was kind of getting sidetracked, so I started doing cartoons as a form of expression.

I've always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.

My songs are a direct route into my brain and my heart.

When I create an image that helps someone - even just myself - find peace, then I've attained my goal.

I've always loved painting, although I never show anyone what I've done. Mainly because I don't do it well. But it's like a form of visual diary for me. A way of fixing things in my mind.

Well, painting is the one thing I do, that is just me. It's me and easels, and the pencils. And as long as I don't drool too much over the canvas, the colors come out pretty good. And it's a chance to express all that I've got inside, that I sometimes keep hidden. And I think that's why I paint big broad, wide open landscapes.

If you want to express yourself, you need the services of a lover or a psychiatrist; if you want to express a book, you might conceivably manage it.