Molly Crabapple quotes:

Neutrality and boredom are the weapons of the state.

I love comics, but I'd rather cut off my thumbs than do nothing but.

A lot of things sound neutral, but they're not. A typical example would involve police violence. It's usually forbidden to call police "murderers," even if they're convicted of murder. People will say that it sounds hysterical and unobjective.

Despite everything we know about photo manipulation, a photo is still considered an objective document.

Different types of sex work are differently supportive. If I were working in a strip club, I would be competing with my colleagues, and while there would be support, there would be financial motivation not to offer too much support.

I absorbed the lie that any smart woman would use birth control and be responsible for her body. Obviously that's not true.

I hated being a child because to be a child means that you are essentially the property of your parents, benevolently or not.

Innocence is always the state of being untouched. Sometimes it's synonymous with virginity, so sometimes it's quite literal, but sometimes it's more of a mental state of being untouched, of not having seen a lot of the world.

Mainstream feminism might remember that the war on women always starts with the war on whores.

One thing about Guantánamo, beyond anything else, is the commitment against all odds to allow Americans to view themselves as the good guy, no matter what the situation is.

The thing that I hate is that Nicholas Kristof style of writing where it's like, "I saw the poor, they made me so sad. What can I do about sadness? I am so brave." It's just like, shut up, man, shut up.

When I started my own business, I funded it as a naked model. I still think that the sex industry can, for some men and women, be a powerful tool for improving their financial prospects.

When you hold a graphic novel in your hands, you're holding artist blood made ink.

You start like a white blanket and you have to preserve that, and each year that you live chips away at your essential value.

A woman's beauty is supposed to be her grand project and constant insecurity. We're meant to shellac our lips with five different glosses, but always think we're fat. Beauty is Zeno's paradox. We should endlessly strive for it, but it's not socially acceptable to admit we're there. We can't perceive it in ourselves. It belongs to the guy screaming 'nice tits.

I can't reasonably pretend to be a transparent and omniscient narrator who brings no personal perspective. That person doesn't exist.

I didn't want to be beholden to one person. So I did something where I had hundreds of people who backed the work. I could just do work, and since a lot of people were interested in it, I wasn't beholden to any particular one of them.

I feel like the traditional patron system meant that you would kiss the ass of one rich person and then hide all of the financial goings-on of your work, and you could pretend you were pure.

I had difficulty being friends with women who hadn't worked in either the sex or beauty industries. I felt like other women sometimes overvalued beauty and sexuality, when in actuality, they're just parts of a job.

If there's a theme in my work, it's that I like to focus on smart people who are facing oppression and who are fighting back against it.

I've just found the stories of the people I'm talking to much more interesting than my reactions to them.

Maybe you shouldn't be working as a jailer in Guantánamo. Maybe that's why you feel spiritually unhealthy.

Rohini Mohan read. While she did, I sketched her. She writes with such beauty and violence, and it seemed like the best way to listen was to really watch her, in the way that only drawing someone lets me do.

The main difference between illustration and comics is that comics are much, much more work. Every comics page is the equivalent of six to nine illustrations.

The occupation is really terrible on a variety of levels. It's terrible on the "shooting people and torturing people in prison" level. But I think the thing that is very hard to convey is that it's also this bureaucratic grinding-down and daily humiliation that I think would probably be as horrible as the spectacular violence.

The thing is, Guantánamo is also a naval base, and they're under the delusion - especially the people on the naval side who are not dealing with the prison - that they can just pretend this is an ordinary Caribbean naval base. For them, it's: "Why are you making such a big deal out of the most notorious prison in the world?" It's like if people living near Buchenwald said they wanted to talk about the other lovely things in the region besides the camp.

The truth is, the vast majority of medical care for lower income people in America is shitty. If you go to a free clinic to receive any form of care, the majority of those will be overcrowded with nurses who are tired because they have to work with so many people. We are not a country that invests public money into taking care of poor people, so we usually rely on clinics with very overburdened and underpaid staff.

When virtue was spoken of in the classical sense, for men, it always meant bravery or protecting others or being an adventurer and going out into the world - whereas a woman's virtue meant keeping her legs closed.

You can't use a drawing to prove a war crime. A drawing doesn't have that notion that it's proof of a reality. Because of that, you can do all sorts of interesting things in it.

Rejection is inevitable. Let it hit you hard for a moment, feel the hurt, and then move on.

New York makes me swoony and in love. The New York of the 1880s was a place where black eye fixers did a brisk business and people were routinely killed for their shoes. But, the constant aspiration of the city never changes.