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

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.

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

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

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

The only burning passion I'm sure I have, is the passion for sex.

I moved further and further away from mass entertainment. The sexual element became increasingly sinister and bizarre. Don't blame me! The bastards drove me to it! They all backed off after that!

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

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.

I have always had an abiding interest in that type of female anatomy.

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.

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

I do covers for CDs and LPs of music that I like, reissues of old-time music, and then I'm inspired to make some kind of drawing based on this love of the music. I don't do album covers or CD covers for groups or musicians I don't like or have no interest in.

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.

I would call myself a Gnostic. Which means, I'm interested in pursuing and understanding the spiritual nature of things. A Gnostic is somebody seeking knowledge of that aspect of reality.

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. So there's some connection between visual images and music.

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.

Pictures have a lot more power than text. Text is just a bunch of little symbols. You have to actually read it and imagine it, and even that can be censored. With pictures, it's a lot more immediate.

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.

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

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

There's many heroic underappreciated investigative journalists.

Violence begets violence, and then you get leaders who are violent men. And you don't want that.

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.

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.

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

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.

Writing a screenplay needs to be more than words on a page - and by the way, I think the words on the page are something you have to try to execute on the highest level you can; I'm not dismissing that by any regard.

The fall couture presentations in Paris are usually my favorite moment on the fashion calendar: beautiful weather, a busy rather than manic schedule, and, let's face it, seeing the artistry, the embroidery, and handmade magnificence that goes into every dress.

As long as sixty years ago, when I first started to read newspapers, I read of floods on the Yellow River and the Yangtze. Who rushed in with men and money to help? The Americans did.

The Louvre for me is a wonderful experience. Because it continues; it didn't get cut off. It was actually a continuous involvement all the way, and a lot of people have come and gone, come and gone; but I'm still here.

Love at first sight is easy to understand; it’s when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.

People are like, 'Wow you started your own record label,' and treat me like I'm some sort of innovative genius, when I'm not at all. You've got the Internet and music - you put them together, and people hear your music.

The camera cannot lie but it can be an accessory to untruth.

People believe in the power of education to change lives.

People themselves are full of tunnels: winding, dark spaces and caverns; impossible to know all the places inside of them. Impossible even to imagine.

There's so much interference, so much static and people's voices talking about what you do and why you do it that I've learned to be like, 'No, no.' It's actually simple. I just do this.

Life is like a carnival. The cotton candy is all of the sweet things in your life. The carnies are the unwanted junk. The rides represent all of the diversity and choices. And then there is the dunk tank a place where you can get all of your angry out just like your friends when you vent to them.

The Room I wrote in 1957, and I was really gratified to find that it stood up. I didn't have to change a word.

When we speak of faith - the faith that can move mountains - we are not speaking of faith in general but of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

When I was five. That's when I started to love film.

Judge not, that ye be not judged

I love food. I'm not a great cook, but I love to cook, and I like how different it is from writing.

It is no light matter to put in jeopardy a single life when it is the very singularity of each life which underpins the idea of a just society.

The stores and the things like that, the business side of things came out at the point when, I'd say probably in the early '70s, it looked like the year of the singer-songwriter was over, 'cause music changed in our time and the spotlight was out.

I always say beauty is only sin deep.

Nor rural sights alone but rural sounds exhilirate the spirit and restore the tone of languid nature.

When things break its not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. Its because a little piece gets lost the two remaining ends couldnt fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape has changed.

Playing Etta James in the movie 'Cadillac Records' really changed me. It was a darker character, and I realized that if anything is too comfortable, I want to run from it. It's no fun being safe.