Molly Crabapple Quotes

I started drawing when I was four. It fast became a way to relate to a world where classmates wrote death threats on my book bag. In grade school, I'd draw kids so they wouldn't hit me. Artists are courtiers more often than rebels. Painters survived the gulags by drawing criminals' kids. Being small and skilled, you learn to create little portals of escapism-to which the strong are as susceptible as anyone else.

I feel like political engagement is something that people, if they’re so inclined, all people should do...It’s not something that’s just for special, branded activists. It’s in part being a citizen.

I think one of the problems that Americans often have when we're thinking about the Middle East is that Americans often only see images of the Middle East that come from war. So Americans might not realize that there are actually hundreds of thousands of people living in Raqqa, just like normal people, and if you take that awareness away, then it becomes very easy "Oh, bomb them all."

I think that school just isn't for everyone. A lot of people don't learn well when they have to sit in a place for eight hours. A lot of people learn best lying in their own beds, teaching themselves from books. And I was a bad student, I was a brat — if I was a teacher, I would not have liked myself — but this hammering kids to fit into this system is horrific. It leads to a lot of kids being either medicalized or criminalized, and I think the message I would have to kids is just like, survive it. And then, once you're out of childhood, I mean, you're just so much freer.

Drawing is disruptive. You're producing when you're expected to consume.

Look at this vast, beautiful, crazy, fucked-up, gorgeous, horrifying world. How could you not be inspired by it?

The Jewish heritage that resonates the most with me is our history as rebels and rootless cosmopolitans. Our history as the first white Freedom Riders who were murdered. Our history as dissident intellectuals like Hannah Arendt. Our skepticism, our nonalignment, all the things that made authoritarians throughout the world hate us so much.

You take photos. Drawings you make. Cameras steal life force. Paintings, like The Picture of Dorian Gray, give you more.

Women are looked at. But as an artist, I had permission to look back. Where the respectable avert their gaze, artists stare.