Top 35 Robert Crumb Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’m an outsider. I will always be an outsider.”

— Robert Crumb

2. “At least I hate myself as much as I hate anybody else.”

— Robert Crumb

3. “I’m just a negative person, a deeply negative person. I see the worst aspects of everything.”

— Robert Crumb

4. “When I listen to old music, that’s one of the few times that I actually have a kind of love for humanity.”

— Robert Crumb

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

— Robert Crumb

6. “Your vigor for life appalls me.”

— Robert Crumb

7. “Hey kids, while you’re out smashing the state keep a smile on your lips and a song in your hearts.”

— Robert Crumb

8. “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.”

— Robert Crumb

9. “They can buy talent. You can’t buy it for yourself, but you can buy other people’s talent to serve your purposes. And once an artist does that, he becomes like a plaything of the rich.”

— Robert Crumb

10. “I couldn’t find any good pictures in magazines of ordinary modern street corners in America, so I persuaded this guy I knew in Sacramento – Stanley Something-or-other – to spend a day with me driving around just to take snapshots.”

— Robert Crumb

11. “I don’t do album covers or CD covers for groups or musicians I don’t like or have no interest in.”

— Robert Crumb

12. “I draw the line at some things. 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.”

— Robert Crumb

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

— Robert Crumb

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

— Robert Crumb

15. “I lose patience with long stories. I get people who go, “Crumb, do some long stories, do a graphic novel.” Novel-schmovel.”

— Robert Crumb

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

16. “There’s some connection between visual images and music. But there’s plenty of old records where I have no idea what the band looked like, or even what sort of context the music was played in.”

— Robert Crumb

17. “Everything that is strong in me has gone into my art work.”

— Robert Crumb

Featured in: Strong Quotes

18. “I always had a sketchbook with me when I was young. I was hiding behind it, basically, hiding behind drawing because I couldn’t cope with people in real life; I was very shy and very nervous around people.”

— Robert Crumb

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

— Robert Crumb

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

— Robert Crumb

21. “You don’t have journalists over there anymore, what they have is public relations people. That’s what they have over in America now. Two-hundred and fifty thousand people in public relations. And a dwindling number of actual reporters and journalists.”

— Robert Crumb

22. “I’m into old-time music, I’m not very interested in modern, popular music at all. And if I’m really into some particular old-time musician, some fiddler or banjo player, I’m always dying of curiosity to see what they look like.”

— Robert Crumb

23. “The comics are where all the crazy subconscious stuff comes out.”

— Robert Crumb

24. “I was a child of American popular culture. All I did as a kid was what I could get at the local supermarket or the dime store. Nothing else was seen. Plus what was on television, or the movie theatre. That was it.”

— Robert Crumb

25. “I guess I didn’t enjoy drawing very much. It was like homework.”

— Robert Crumb

26. “Violence begets violence, and then you get leaders who are violent men. And you don’t want that.”

— Robert Crumb

27. “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.”

— Robert Crumb

28. “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.”

— Robert Crumb

29. “Throwaway pens are no good – I never liked them. I’ve tried them all.”

— Robert Crumb

30. “The fine-art world knows very little about the cartoon world.”

— Robert Crumb

31. “Hell is yourself too.”

— Robert Crumb

32. “I use photos a lot for drawing people and personalities, but they’re almost never photos that I’ve taken.”

— Robert Crumb

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

— Robert Crumb

34. “I still can’t spend a lot of money on records at collector prices. There’s something in me that just won’t allow me to do that. But I will trade my artwork, which I know is worth thousands of dollars.”

— Robert Crumb

35. “Yeah, I was a child of American popular culture.”

— Robert Crumb

36. “There’s many heroic underappreciated investigative journalists.”

— Robert Crumb

37. “Drawing is a way for me to articulate things inside myself that I can’t otherwise grasp.”

— Robert Crumb

38. “I didn’t invent anything; it’s all there in the culture; it’s not a big mystery. I just combine my personal experience with classic cartoon stereotypes.”

— Robert Crumb

39. “Some of the wealthy collectors have paid lots of money for artwork that I already did, but I didn’t do it with the intention of catering to them. I think part of the reason my work is attractive to people like that is because it doesn’t cater to them.”

— Robert Crumb