Jonathan Pryce Quotes

A lot of my friends are struggling musicians. Being a struggling actor, it's just frustrating because you're not allowed to do what you want to do.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.

After high school, I worked as a messenger boy at a local bank. I was miserable. I felt like Robin Hood chained in the Sheriff of Nottingham's dungeon. As a would-be writer, I thought it was a catastrophe. As a bank employee, I could barely add or subtract and had to count on my fingers.

A writer is seldom satisfied with the condition he finds himself in. We're all given to fretting a lot.

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

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.

It was always disappointing to see that what I could really master in terms of form boiled down to so little.

Don't be a writer; it's a terrible way to live your life. There's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don't expect anything from anybody.

I'm not happy when I'm writing, but I'm more unhappy when I'm not.

I talk to people who are musicians, and they go, Oh this is hell. And I go, Are you kidding me? You never put tar paper on a roof, did ya?

There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist.

Joni Mitchell seems destined to remain in a state of permanent dissatisfaction - always knowing what she would like to do, always more depressed when it's done.

I was a journalist, but I was starving. And I've written fiction, but I couldn't get a publisher. So, I was basically a very frustrated creative person working in advertising, and even there, I have a great idea that client won't buy it.

I got involved in music because I love everything about it, but now I'm in it you see the other side and it isn't much fun. Not as glamorous and enjoyable as you imagine.

I was tired of illustration. You'd work so hard on a commission and it would go in to a magazine, and you'd turn the page and it was gone.

My family's lineage is five generations of artists who never made it.

I'm envious of writers and musicians. I think it must be so difficult. Not just the frustration, but the discipline.

My hunger and desperation, being an actor, an out of work actor - my memory of that is as fresh as an open wound.

By the time I left the bar, I was 30. I was a dishwasher. They call it a bar-back, but essentially, I washed dishes for a living. I had no high-school diploma, I had no agent, and my literary successes were non-existent... but it was the only thing I ever wanted to do, so I did feel trapped.

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.

By the time I'm done with a project, it's taken so long that I usually don't even like it anymore. I only see the things I wish I'd done differently.

It can be a miserable profession, acting, because you always want what you can't have.

Unfortunately - as I have experienced first-hand, as many artists have - there's a gaping hole between platinum and non-existent. There's no in-between.