Quotes from Ben Katchor

Sometimes I make things that people have very strong responses to. Whether that's art, I don't know. That's one of those words that doesn't mean anything. It's why I don't just use words.

A picture story just doesn't run like a film. It doesn't have 24 frames per second. It doesn't deal with this illusion of movement.

I'm very interested in music and where these sounds of Western music come from.

You can have your own watch and always doubt it. If I had a watch I'd probably always be doubting it or the batteries would be dying. I just know that people always have trouble with their watches, and that's why I like public clocks.

I think Jewish history did away with a priesthood when the Temple was destroyed, and it became, supposedly, a religion of scholars. A rabbi is just a scholar.

There's something exciting about weekly strips in that you're following the way the story reveals itself to the writer week by week. All the possible directions it could have taken are there; it's a kind of participatory reading that I think books discourage.

I've wasted the last five years of my life dealing in religious articles. People today find spiritual solace in ballroom dancing.

The publishing industry has always wanted to make books as cheaply and as ephemerally as they could; it's nothing new.

I live in an apartment building built in 1925, and it hasn't been heavily renovated, so I feel very much connected to that time and what went on in that place.

Goat curry and a female librarian, that's what I'm in the mood for.

I've wasted the last five years of my life dealing in religious articles. People today find spiritual solace in ballroom dancing.

After forty years of selling wholesale industrial deodorizing supplies, one establishment is forced to open its doors to the public. In the lingo of the trade, a salesman explains why their large institution buyers have gone elsewhere. Who wants to stand downwind of the League o' Nations every time some freshman with a bladder infection pulls a Nebuchadnezzar?

You see these unsold goods taking up space in busy stores and ask yourself, 'Who would ever buy such a thing? To whose antiquated and misguided sense of taste would such a thing appeal?' To the dead, I answer! The dead are the eternally out of fashion! ... These piles of unsold goods are conclusive proof of the existence of an eternal and insatiable appetite.

I was born Moishe Ketzelbourd but the Indians call me Maurice Cougar.

What sort of attractions do you think lured our coreligionists out of the ghetto and into the mainstream of European culture? Was it the wit of Molière, or the ingenious stage mechanisms of Pixérécourt? Or was it simply the opportunity to cast an eye, without shame, upon the living, unclad human form?

In America, there's a very long tradition of a comic strip that comes in newspapers, which is not true all over the world. To sell papers, they put color comics in.

I remember as a child going to an exhibit about the Soviet Union, and every paper had this alien smell. The paper and the ink were all exported. It was like a piece of cheese from that country, you could touch it, feel it, smell it, and it was different.

As a small kid, I came across things like these early Edward Gorey books in department-store bookstores. These were these really unusual objects to me. I didn't know how they fit into the comic world or into newspaper comics.

I never wore a watch. I always depend on public clocks, and stores have clocks, but that is strange.