Joey Lauren Adams Quotes

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.

African film makers are scraping by on a mere pittance.

With all the awards I've won, you'd think that I'd at least be able to make a living. It's a really terrible situation.

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

If all you boast of your great art be true; Sure, willing poverty lives most in you.

The average family earning minimum wage spends 141 percent of their income struggling to meet basic needs - food, shelter, clothing.

Shame is no comrade for the poor, I weet.

When you ain’t got no money, you got the blues.

Having grown up in dire poor, the thing that I hated the most in life was poverty.

[The Goths'] poverty was incurable; since the most liberal donatives were soon dissipated in wasteful luxury, and the most fertile estates became barren in their hands.

I just hated poverty.

The worst thing about poverty is not the actual living of it, but the shame of it.

Broke is temporary, poor is eternal.

In the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman dresses below herself from caprice.

Genius may be almost defined as the faculty of acquiring poverty.

The children of the poor are so apt to look as if the rich would have been over-blest with such! Alas for the angel capabilities, interrupted so soon with care, and with after life so sadly unfulfilled.

The economy is so bad that bedbugs are now infesting sleeping bags and tents, because they can't afford to stay in hotels anymore.

It is hard to apply oneself to study when there is no money to pay for food and lodging. I almost never explain these things when folks are asking me why I don't do this or that.

My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close. I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack.

One must have been, at some time or other, in a situation where a small sum was as necessary almost as life itself, with no more ability to raise it than to raise the dead, before he can fully appreciate the value of money.

We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt.

Over the hill to the poor-house I'm trudgin' my weary way.