A biography for Robert Crumbhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The fine-art world knows very little about the cartoon world.”
“I have always had an abiding interest in that type of female anatomy.”
“I felt so painfully isolated that I vowed I would get revenge on the world by becoming a famous cartoonist.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Everything that is strong in me has gone into my art work.”
“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 Bible was not written for entertainment purposes, so it's a real hodgepodge and a compendium of all kinds of stuff.”
“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.”
“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.”
“You can't make everybody love you. It's an exercise in futility, and it's probably not even a good idea to try.”
“You don't have to be a Fundamentalist Christian to be interested in the Bible. It's really a fascinating mythology.”
“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.”
“Most of my adult life I had this towering contempt for America.”
“The comics are where all the crazy subconscious stuff comes out.”