Harvey Pekar Quotes & Sayings (Page 6)

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

“People who are readers of fiction aren't particularly interested in comic books.”

“People writing about me have said that I've influenced a lot of people, and there are some artists who have credited me with influencing them.”

“Plays have been made of my comics.”

“Some of the most valuable stuff I do has to do with my dissenting from the general opinion about people in movements.”

“There hasn't been enough change in comics to suit me. I don't know why exactly.”

“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.”

“When I was a kid, back in the '40s, I was a voracious comic book reader. And at that time, there was a lot of patriotism in the comics. They were called things like 'All-American Comics' or 'Star-Spangled Comics' or things like that. I decided to do a logo that was a parody of those comics, with 'American' as the first word.”

“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 always wanted praise, and I always wanted attention; I won't lie to you. I was a jazz critic, and that wasn't good enough for me. I wanted people to write about me, not me about them. So I thought, 'What could I do? I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't act or anything like that. OK, I can write.'”