Struggling Artists Quotes

Actors wait tables, directors work at video stores.

I think most art comes out of poverty and hard times.

Most actors I'm in touch with are struggling financially.

Los Angeles is peopled by waiters and carpenters and drivers who are there to be actors.

Most of the artists were trying to make a living, trying to get laid, trying to figure out who they were. They weren't trying to change the world. That's what other people put on them. I knew all those people. I knew them all, intimately and well. Bob Dylan. I would say that Bob Dylan is as interested in money as any person I've known in my life. That's just the truth.

If you work in Chicago in the improv scene, anyone is happy for you if you get a job.

Unfortunately, young Russian artists are in a difficult position today. Painting, like all other arts, rests on a continuity of experience. More than anything, young painters and sculptors need to know the works of their immediate elders. Such a continuity does not exist here to a sufficient degree in the visual arts.

Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.

Housing vouchers are a vital lifeline for many people I know in New Orleans and around the country, including struggling artists.

I think a lot of people, when they start to become famous, they don't necessarily have the mental equipment to deal with it yet, so they try to keep it at arm's length and try to avoid it, which is fine for a while, but you can't keep pursuing a career in acting and that remain your attitude towards fame and recognition.

The kind of films I want to make are struggling to get made. And if they are getting made, they're getting made on shoestring budgets with not enough time.

Our joy was to do theater. And in some theaters, the only pay we got was tokens for carfare.

Most of the best music in American history was made by people with no options.

Don't move to L.A to become an actress - you'll just be a waitress. Don't drive to Nashville to become a country music star - you'll just end up playing empty honky-tonks at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday.

And we were angry and poor and happy, And proud of seeing our names in print.

I know actors who have had to turn down good roles because they just don't pay enough. It's hard.

I was once a struggling artist, so I just want to help others, and provide my resources and connections and the people I know.

A lot of talented actors still have to pay their bills.

There are times when we look back and think, 'Do you remember when we had to lug a piano downstairs to a basement of some venue to play for five people?' We do a lot of reminiscing. It helps us keep our heads on straight.

Eyeing the traffic circulating the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard in exchange for rent. The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder. Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke-down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if not in the outside world.

A lot of singers entered the industry with me. A lot of them struggled. Many have not been able to make it but some have sustained.

I have seen great jazz musicians die obscure and drinking themselves to death and not really being able to get any work and working in small, funky jazz clubs.

I'd been in Hollywood for five years before I started writing 'The Guild.' I worked enough to pay all my bills. So I was very lucky in that respect. Most people don't make a living acting.

Cinema is a thankless industry where sometimes to appear on the cinematic scenery is a thing for late bloomers and people who are very patient. The places are accounted, and the space is often unwelcoming. Money is rare, and independent voices are muted by the almost complete absence of risk takers.

I feel a lot of cities are like, you go and you are trying to do your art, and there are so many other artists there who are so brilliant. And it's kind of like they stomp on the scene, and they are like, "You're not already Picasso? Get the hell out of here!" And Memphis is like, "Well, you'll get there one day!"