Starving Artist Quotes & Sayings

It's really hard to find materials. Also, prices of metal have gone completely through the roof, insanely expensive. And if you go to a dictionary and look up starving artist, you'll see my picture. — Z'EV

I sat down and looked at the menu and thought how ironic it was that back then starving artists came to cafes like these because they lived on wine and street pigeons to survive, and now the same cafes are famous because of them and no starving artist can afford to eat there. It's hard to have an existential crisis when a glass of wine costs more than nine dollars. — Josefina Lopez

I never understood, what a starving artist was until I became one. — Mary Sage Nguyen

Even St. Teresa said, "I can pray better when I'm comfortable," and she refused to wear her haircloth shirt or starve herself. I don't think living in cellars and starving is better for an artist than it is for anybody else. — Katherine Anne Porter

I'm basically a starving artist. — John Trudell

The privilege of struggling artists is ... the life being buried in what we can't really afford of* what a gorgeous life!! — Hiroko Sakai

I'm an entrepreneur, a businessman. I've got a lot of money, and that doesn't go very well with the whole 'starving artist in a garret' routine. — Felix Dennis

I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write. But starvation, unfortunately, didn't improve art. It only hindered it. A man's soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax. — Charles Bukowski

She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a balanced life with down days and miseries to keep the sharp edge on her work. But the idea that an artist needed to suffer to do her best work was a conceit of the young and inexperienced. The happier she grew, the better she wrote. — Dean Koontz

I am, as they say, the classic starving artist. — Cheryl Strayed

I didn't really go the starving-artist route. I kind of went and did massive, commercial things. — Ashton Kutcher

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

I was born, slipping on a symphony of broken melancholy; created of pencils and crayons; i was not supposed to be this way. i guess i am a "disappointment". i paint and draw. i like to write poetry. The things I excel at could fit inside my shoe." Excerpt from the poem,"Pain"written in 1995, by E.H. Cato(my maiden name) featured in Volume 2 of the Rantings & Ravings Series, 2013. — Emily H. Sturgill

From recovery to rags and rags to recovery symbolizes art - a perfect compilation of human imperfections. — Criss Jami

Starving artist: starving for affection, starving for attention — Jessica-Lynn Barbour

Starving artist' is acceptable at age 20, suspect at age 40, and problematical at age 60. — Robert Genn

The most defeatist thing I hear is, "I'm going to give it a couple of years." You can't set a clock for yourself. If you do, you are not a writer. You should want it so badly that you don't have a choice. You have to commit for the long haul. There's no shame in being a starving artist. Get a day job, but don't get too good at it. It will take you away from your writing. — Matthew Weiner

Somehow, the French got this idea of the starving artist. Very romantic, except it's not so romantic for the starving artist. — David Lynch

Why didn't you dare it before? he asked harshly.
When I hadn't a job? When I was starving? When I was just as I am now, as a man, as an artist, the same Martin Eden? That's the question. I've been asking myself for many a day. My brain is the same old brain. And what is puzzling me is why they want me now. Surely they don't want me for myself, for myself the same olf self they did not want. They must want me for something else, for something that is outside of me, for something that is not I. Shall I tell you what that something is? It is for the recognition I have recieved. That recognition is not I. Then again for the money I have earned and am earnin. But money is not I. And is it for the recognition and money, that you now want me? — Jack London

Over the last forty years, many educators, decision-makers, and even some parents have come to regard the arts as peripheral, and let's face it, frivolous - especially the visual arts, with their connotation of "the starving artist" and the mistaken concept of necessary talent — Betty Edwards

I think that most artists scorned would prefer to be known as the one with the genius brain risking no career over the one with the good brain and great career. — Criss Jami

Another year is fast approaching. Go be that starving artist you're afraid to be. Open up that journal and get poetic finally. Volunteer. Suck it up and travel. You were not born here to work and pay taxes. You were put here to be part of a vast organism to explore and create. Stop putting it off. The world has much more to offer than what's on 15 televisions at TGI Fridays. Take pictures. Scare people. Shake up the scene. Be the change you want to see in the world. — Jason Mraz