Cyrus Broacha Quotes

The economics of being a playwright are abysmal. I like to think of the work I do out in Hollywood as a way to actually make a life in the theater easier.

I was doing a lot of great theatre, but I just couldn't work out how to make ends meet.

After graduating from National School of Drama, I started doing theatre in Delhi. But there was not much money in Hindi theatre.

Even if you're lucky to have a play on Broadway like 'Chinglish,' you don't necessarily earn enough off it to support the years it takes to get there.

I've never made any money off of any of my films. Statement of fact. So without commercial work, I would be in big trouble.

I started when I was in 'The King and I' when I was on Broadway when I was nine.

I know I'm in the exceptional position of having money but I didn't have it for many decades.

I have been working since I was 20, and I'm 38. I actually once averaged out what I had made over my professional life. I think I could have made that much as a waiter or an insurance salesman. You know, I spent so many years in my 20's making $10,000 a year.

Up until the time I was 31 years old, in Spain, I still didn't know how I was going to pay the rent.

I did a drama degree, went to secretarial college, then got a job with a theatre company in Birmingham. It's been a slow burn, which doesn't seem to have gone out.

It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.

My parents did not discourage me but could not understand how I could make a living by art. Their idea of an artist was a person who was condemned to starvation.

Which, of course, isn't the point of writing - but it would be nice if, along with the creative satisfaction of writing and seeing my work in print, I could do more than merely scrape a living. Okay, moaning over.

There's a great charm in theatre; I enjoyed doing it for twelve years and did lots of plays. At this chapter of my life, I am a cinema actor, and I would like to continue to be so, and at some point I would return to the theatre.

I don't know if there was even a hundred million dollars in the whole country!

When I was a child, there was very little money, so I've always been concerned for my financial security, which has meant that finding myself as a writer was a bad move. The practical difference the money has made is that I can support myself by fiction. That is what I have been trying to do throughout my life.

Many good qualities are not sufficient to balance a single want - the want of money.

I was never a hugely successful theatre designer. I painted a lot of scenery and did the lighting, and my lighting business grew out of that.

It's the typical mid-life crisis kind of thing, where you just stop and wonder, 'Should I go back to university and get a law degree?' I kind of looked around me and thought, 'What kind of idiot am I that I've just spent the last 10 years writing novels? Financially, I'm pretty much where I was when I was 28.'

I wish our wallet could match our warmth.

Your parents only want what's best for you. They know a career in the arts usually means living paycheck to paycheck; they just want you to know that you have other options!

One of my aims was to be paid as well as a plumber. Plumber was better-paid than any performance artist who was always doing this for free. It is so important to make a good living from art. You know, John Cage, until he was 60, he couldn't pay electricity.

Money was always on my mind when I was growing up. So I was always wondering how we were going to afford this and that. Acting seemed to be a shortcut out of the mess.

I got a job right out of drama school as assistant stage manager at the Bristol Old Vic. I've been lucky enough to stay in work ever since.

I grew up doing certain little things in the musical theatre realm, but I didn't really understand that you could... make a career out of it.