Anthony McCarten Quotes

As an artist, you are aware there is this strange money market out there, but you have no sense of how it works.

I'm all about supporting anyone whose art is also the way they make their living.

Making a living in the arts, though, creates so many jobs for other people.

I'm 37 years old and don't have a steady paycheck.

My guitarist husband, Mike, and writer me are the old-fashioned kind of bohemians. Not 'fro-haired hipsters gyrating in iPod ads, but the sort who, starting January 1 of every year, literally don't know where their next dime is coming from.

The big pay-off was to work as an artist and gain some shred of respect from your friends, who were also artists. But there was never any notion that you could make a living out of art. On the rare occasions you had a gallery show, and sold a little work, well, that was just gravy.

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

The reason I do this job is because I started to be a painter. Making money in art was difficult. The easiest way to make money was to use art for some other reason. One of the easiest and most interesting from an economic point of view was fashion. Fashion pays.

My parents did not discourage me but could not understand how I could make a living by art. Their idea of an artist was a person who was condemned to starvation.

Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.

If you want to devote yourself to the arts, you'd better do it strictly from passion, because there is zero guarantee that you'll get anywhere. The hardest thing is dealing with business people who have nothing to do with your art. They could care less that you're up at 4:30 in the morning writing a joke. Don't expect any sympathy from anybody.

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

I think my parents were surprisingly cool with me entering the arts. Although, I think they thought it was going to be a phase, and they didn't expect me to actually stick with it, and rightfully so. They were concerned whether I could afford groceries, being an actor.

People romanticize struggle and obscurity, and I get that, but it's a very one-dimensional argument to say that people who have money are evil, and artists who are poor are virtuous.

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.

It's hard to live just by selling paintings.

It's a fun uphill struggle, making health insurance as a comedian, actor, and author. But it's hard to explain to people how I make a living. In New York, most people know enough creative types that I make some sense. But when I'm talking to someone like my suburban cousins or my mom's friends, it doesn't always go smoothly.

It's nearly impossible to make a living in the arts.

Younger writers and smaller writers need to live and get by. They need to be paid. It has to be fair.

I decided that the whole idea of what it means to be an artist was that somehow you are ontologically oriented toward poverty : "As an artist, you don't make money." I had to figure out some kind of way to guarantee that I'd be able to continue doing the work that I wanted to do, whether I made money from the work I was doing or not.

I was supporting myself, but nothing like the guy painters, as I refer to them. I always resented that actually.. we were all getting the same amount of press, but they were going gangbusters with sales.

I was never shielded from the realities of what it meant to be an artist and that made me afraid to be an artist because I wanted to know that my life was secure.

The creditors are proving impossible to deal with and short of a sudden appearance on the scene of wealthy art patrons, we are going to be turned out of this dear little house where I led a simple life and was able to work so well. I do not know what will become of us.

I would say basically the commonplace observation that kids aren't going to earn as much as their parents is now is a coin flip at this point. Are you going to do better than your parents? It's a 50-50 chance, whereas if you were born in the 1940s or 1950s, you had more than a 90 percent chance you were going to do better than your parents. So basically almost a guarantee for most kids that you were going to achieve the American Dream of doing better than your parents did. Today, that's certainly no longer the case.

Did you ever figure to be living in a time when your check is good, but the bank bounces?