Ellen Burstyn Quotes

To be famous and broke is hard.

My son tried to work in films and he ultimately gave it up, he finally couldn't make a living, he couldn't support himself. He worked all the time and he didn't make enough money to have a house, have an apartment.

Poverty of course is no disgrace, but it is damned annoying.

I am, as they say, the classic starving artist.

I'm basically a starving artist.

Poe was plagued and haunted most of all by something pretty banal: poverty. Probably the most eccentric decision in life was to become a writer in an age when making a living at it was nearly impossible.

You think if you win the Olympics, you'll become a millionaire overnight. But I was still scraping the barrel, looking down the back of the settee for pound coins to buy a pint of milk.

Everything I've done in my career has been for nothing.

I would say that many of the characters in my stories do not live in true poverty - they are not out on the street; they are not wondering if there will be anything to eat in the next week. They are people who are at the lower echelons of the economic strata.

Footage of people camped out at Best Buy or elsewhere is not remotely a celebration. Rather, it's a reminder of just how economically distressed a large percentage of our populace is.

The time when I had desire to go to the United States I didn't have a penny. It was in the middle of the depression, you know. I couldn't get as far as Hoboken at that time.

You and I can be busy, and we take a vacation from work. You can't take a break from being poor. You can't say, 'Hey I've had enough of worrying about money, I'm just going to be rich for a couple of weeks until I've recovered.'

I wouldn't recommend being a musician to anyone. It's not glamorous. It's a lot of being dirty, not eating, playing for five people and one of them is the bartender.

There is nothing worse than being ashamed of parsimony or poverty.

When you look at guys who get recruited, most of the best athletes, they come from poor families. I don't forget. I was a junior looking through my mother's stuff and looked at her bank statement, and we had $30 in the bank.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

After we were married, we were broke. Flat broke. Not only did we not have health insurance, we could barely keep a roof over our heads, let alone have the kind of coin to throw around on onesies and Pampers.

Poverty us no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.

For many, the American dream has become a nightmare.

In my early days, I was about 145 pounds. I was really a starving artist; the poster child for starving artists.

It's such a Bore Being always Poor.

I grew up with no money. No money. I always struggled and had the sense that there was this other class of people who went to college - this was when I was younger.

You lose your individuality a huge amount when you have no money, and I certainly had that experience.

We had to make ends meet. My parents were divorced, so my father wasn't really in my life. We grew up like most kids, just wanting things.

In a packed programme tonight, we will be talking to an out-of-work contortionist who says he can no longer make ends meet.