Natalie Prass Quotes

I am, as they say, the classic starving artist.

My mom lived by herself with two kids. Sacrifice was the name of the game at our house.

I was not a girl who grew up buying $100 candles. I was the girl who ran out of gas on her way to an audition.

I've always been the person to look at any turmoil as temporary. I recall times where my mom was working five and six jobs, and there's still no food in the house.

Coming from a middle class background, I faced a lot of hardships during my initial years in Mumbai. I did not have much money and had to sing jingles and bhajans to survive. But those years taught me that a singer should be versatile.

Living in Flint, poverty is an obstacle that you have to fight through. I always had to fend for my brother and sister - I was always the one to sacrifice my meals so that they could eat.

Being a hungry artist, you don't have the luxury of buying whatever you want. There were years of me doing a lot of odd jobs, this and that just to make ends meet.

As an actress for most of my life, I am profoundly familiar with poverty.

I came to New York with $500 and I had to live on that, but thankfully I was taken up by photographers quickly.

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

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

It was a real hand-to-mouth existence in those early days - I'd have whatever dry cereal there was in the house for breakfast, 30 cents to spend on lunch and a hot dog for dinner. I did that for years. So there was definitely a hunger in me, of various kinds, to succeed.

Everybody was in struggle, in the grind trying to make it.

I had some years of definite frustration. Auditioning and not working as much as I would have liked to, or working and being paid a pittance, and sort of scrounging by in New York and sleeping on a chair that folded out into a bed.

Is an artist much more than a beggar?

My advice: Don't quit. When I got to New York City, I lived so far below the poverty line, because I didn't give in and get a job at 7-Eleven. I think you can thrive in misery.

My mother cleaned homes and drove school buses, and when my family was on the brink of foreclosure... I started bartending and waitressing.

My mother raised me herself, along with my six younger siblings, in Cleveland, and life wasn't easy even in the best of times. At age 42, she died, and it fell on me, then aged 22 and working minimum wage, to take care of all of us. At the time, I was newly married with a baby son. And I was deeply afraid for our future.

I did just about anything to pay the rent for a while.

When you're a starving artist, you make do. It didn't matter that I didn't know where my rent was coming from.

When we first were working, we had no money. We were all sharing this ghastly flat and we had nothing.

After a tumultuous 20-year marriage, my father up and left one day, leaving my mother to raise three boys without the means to do so. And yet somehow she did. At the age of 50, she enrolled in nursing school and became a nurse and worked countless overtime hours and weekend shifts just to give us a fighting chance.

When Kogi started, I was dead broke, selling tacos on the street just to survive.

My mom got 11 kids. We struggled.

I grew up in poverty and my mother had to sacrifice a lot for us to eat and get an education - just imagine in a house where we were more than six children! But hard work and dedication is what it took for me to be here today.