Zoe Lister-Jones Quotes

My friends started having children after college, while I was pursuing this crazy acting career and living hand to mouth. Plus, all my boyfriends were artists struggling to make a living. Having kids didn't make any sense - why would I take on more of a financial burden when I couldn't even afford a dog?

I think it was very important for me to look at starting to build a safety net so that I didn't feel the insecurity of the ups and downs of finances because I might do no film a year, or I might do six commercials, or I might do none.

The joy of art is particularly sweet, though, because it carries with it the threat of rejection, of failure, and of missed connections. It's precisely the high-wire act of "this might not work" that makes original art worth doing.

Maybe that's why there's an insecurity sometimes in acting, because it's not like there's a correlation between hard work and how people receive you.

great artists can be uncertain. Of course they are while strugggling to find solutions. Tolstoi's scripts are almost indecipherable. Emily Dickinson provided four or more alternates for every word; Beethoven wrestled with endings to the point of exhaustion; in our day Jerome Robbins and his lack of decision are a byword in the dance profession. But all of these knew very well what they did not want, and what they did not want was the current coin, the well-worn usage. What they wanted was something newly experienced, and therefore unknown and hard to attain.

Art Gropes. It stalks like a hunter lost in the woods, listening to itself and to everything around it, unsure of itself, waiting to pounce.

It's impossible to make a living in the arts unless you make a fortune. There's almost no in-between. Writers are either broke or rolling in it. Oddly, you can't tell them apart.

There were times when I didn't have enough money, I didn't have enough work, and I would panic.

This whole thing is - our window to be able to fight and make money is very short. It's a short window to be able to take advantage of this and make as much money as we can and save it for the future. When you're not fighting, and the money's not coming in, you can't do that, and that's the part that sucks about this job.

My self-confidence can be measured out in teaspoons mixed into my poetry, and it still always tastes funny in my mouth.

You can blame your ugliness for keeping people at bay, when in reality you're crippled by the thought of letting another person close enough to popentially scar you even more deeply. You can tell yourself that it's safer to love someone who will never really love you back, because you can't lose someone you never had.

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.

In Brazil, when you say you're going to be an artist you always get that point of view that this is a crazy career and you might not make it. In my case, it kind of happened.

I panic every time I put out a record. I think every artist does.

As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that's no guarantee you'll create anything worth all your effort. You're always haunt by the idea you're wasting your life.

I know that it feels dangerous and scary and working without a net, so to speak. And working without a net, for me - maybe other women do it a totally different way - means being vanity-free. That's how, as an artist, I know that I need to work.

There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood.

My parents and I were all afraid of being poor - really poor.

I can't really explain the feeling of acting. It makes you the most insecure you can possibly be.

Self-preservation has a tendency to lead to poverty.

I decided that the whole idea of what it means to be an artist was that somehow you are ontologically oriented toward poverty : "As an artist, you don't make money." I had to figure out some kind of way to guarantee that I'd be able to continue doing the work that I wanted to do, whether I made money from the work I was doing or not.

I think for every artist it's important to always keep this amount of doubt until the very last day of shooting.

Look, it's very easy to sit here right now with some films in the bank that I like and think I have a shot and feel pretty cocky. But, you know, three years from now, I could very easily be saying, 'Paper or plastic?'

No one wants to pursue anything creative anymore, because that's too risky. They may not get the kind of return on the financial investment they've made in their education that they think they should.

I do everything I watch, whether it's like a big comic book film that I've done or something very serious and raw.I do have that initial feeling like I'm the worst, this is awful, my work is - I've let everybody down. I definitely have that.