Artistic Hardship Quotes

If I had the capabilities of being something other than I am, I would. It's no fun being an artist. You know what it's like, writing, it's torture.

You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by.

It's really hard for me, every day, to confront my writing. It never gets easier over time.

There's way too much pain in this business for anyone who doesn't HAVE to write.

I actually started playing in little cafes around New York, and I have a lot of good friends of mine who are musicians who are struggling in New York.

In any case, Ives encouraged me to go into music even though he himself had such a hard time being a composer.

Many great composers have died in poverty. I have not faced hardships, like having to struggle for food, thanks to reasonable producers.

It's sweet to hear, but anyone who says that they want to be the next John Cassavetes is crazy. He had it so tough. No one would want to walk a step in his shoes. Believe me - I wouldn't.

If you were ever a ballerina, you know the pain: just to be able to look like it's all so light, but when they take off their shoes, it's all bloody.

Being a novelist is hard for anyone - male or female. You don't get to quit your day job.

I certainly wake up every morning and thank God that I'm not a novelist because the theater is tough, but novel writing is infinitely harder. Especially with the economics of serious fiction being what they are in America.

Yeah, writers do hate writing.

I'm sorry that our country and the people do not consider the arts as vital to our well-being as, say, medicine. Suffering is unnecessary. It doesn't make you a better artist; it only makes you a hungry one. However, to me the acquisition of the craft of writing was worth any amount of suffering.

The writer's way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats?

America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter or musician. To be a rabbit is better still.

Actors really should be tramps.

I don't think screenwriting is therapeutic. It's actually really, really hard for me. It's not an enjoyable process.

The first thing a writer has to do is find another source of income. Then, after you have begged, borrowed, stolen or saved up the money to give you time to write and you spend all of it staying alive while you write, and you write your heart out, after all that, maybe no one will publish it, and if they publish it, maybe no one will read it. That is the hard truth, that is what it means to be a writer.

Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.

Still, American composers working in France have had a pretty hard time.

How difficult it is to exist, that we are athlete and artist. We have injuries. People don't see the hard side of being a ballerina. They just see this beautiful and effortless thing, and they assume it's easy and cute. I hate when people say it's cute!

It's no fun to be a struggling young actor. It's a desperate thing, no way to be happy. If you have any alternative, you should take it.

To be a creative person and be a professional, as an artist you have to be able to withstand pain, rejection, and for some, a lot of bad feelings, but you have to be able to look through those.

As an actor you always feel like you're swimming upstream.