Harvey Pekar Stuff Quotations

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.

I don't want to play myself up as a hero, because it would make me unbelievable. I'd rather settle for people thinking that I'm a bum, but digging my stories, than liking me and not being able to believe in my stories. That's one reason I've been hard on myself, because I want my stuff to be believable.

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.

I've just been writing stuff down as it comes to me. I haven't thought, 'Let me write some major opus here.'

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 concentrate, more than I think virtually any comic book artist has in the past, on the so-called mundane details of every day life - quotidian life. What happens to a person during a working day, marital relations, and stuff like that.

Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.

I decided I was going to tell these stories. I went around and met Crumb. He was the cartoonist. I started realizing comics weren't just kid stuff.