Harvey Pekar

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

“American Splendor is just an ongoing journal. It's an ongoing autobiography. I started it when I was in my early 30s, and I just keep going.”

“Letterman... he got his problems. We don't get along too well.”

“Plays have been made of my comics.”

“I came up with American Splendor. Some people think it's American Squalor.”

“I'm doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys - Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“If there is something to worry about, my mind has a tendency to worry about it. That can cut two ways. It can really keep you on the ball, but if you worry about every little thing, it's not a good use of time and energy.”

“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?'”

“A respectable-sized audience hasn't really been able to follow developments in jazz since the free jazz movement in the '60s. Some of them can't even get with John Coltrane. Audiences are diminishing more and more rapidly. Some of the top young musicians with something new to say can't get record companies to put out their stuff.”

“I continue to be disappointed that people don't try and diversify the kind of work they are doing in comics.”

“Cleveland has a very bad reputation, but there's a lot of stuff that's left over from when there were very wealthy people - the Art Museum and a world class symphony that's still world class.”

“As a matter of fact, I deliberately look for the mundane, because I feel these stories are ignored. The most influential things that happen to virtually all of us are the things that happen on a daily basis. Not the traumas.”

“I like to go back over history and check out what people have written and whether I agree with it or not.”

“I have to be a freelance writer for the rest of my life, unless I get some kind of real lucky break. But other than that, I'll always have to work. I always worry about whether my stuff is going to get over. Will they like this, will they like that?”

“I'm a guy that likes to sit in one place.”

“The way I write is, I listen to things in my head, and then I copy them down. I memorize conversations and things like that; I seem to be able to do that pretty well. I suppose in that respect there's some improvisation, although I work over the stuff after I've got it down on paper.”

“Things improved a little bit in the '80s; there was kind of a revival of alternative comics, but then they went downhill in the '90s.”