Bette Davis Quotes

There've been moments where I just was tired of being in L.A. It was very difficult. I mean, you're constantly rejected. And that's OK, it's just really frustrating for me, because I try to read scripts and projects that have really great, deeper, meaningful qualities to them.

I was an out-of-work actor for 10 years.

Finding your place as an artist is the hardest thing. You come out of college with what feels like a Mickey Mouse degree that qualifies you for nothing in the real world.

No one ever wanted to hire me. Ever. I've never been recruited anywhere. I have beat my head against every wall, at every place that I worked.

I moved to New York and couldn't get a job as an actor. And waited tables for so long.

So struggling for work here has been very good for me, but it's also been very hard to handle rejection.

I faced many ups and downs, like any other actor: not getting through auditions or even worse - getting shortlisted and not being selected. Most actors go through the process.

I think being creative is incredibly difficult and painful.

The artist lives in an atmosphere of perpetual failure.

Musicians have to suffer to a certain degree in order to obtain their outlet.

The thing I wondered about so much as a young artist, particularly when things weren't going well and I was really struggling, was, "Will I know when to give up? Will I know when I've suffered enough rejection? Will I know when to get out?"

I walked the streets of New York for two years begging for a job, and I couldn't get one.

Songwriting is Hell on Earth. If it isn't, then you're doing it wrong.

A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.

We actors, we're a fragile bunch, and yet we need to be strong because 90% of our lives is rejection.

A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [...]

To be a creative person and be a professional, as an artist you have to be able to withstand pain, rejection, and for some, a lot of bad feelings, but you have to be able to look through those.

For most actors, it's such a struggle to get work. Once they have it, they feel that there's an enormous amount of pressure on them to make it work, and have everyone love them.

Such is an actor's life. We must ride the waves of every film, barfing occasionally, yet maintain our dignity, even as the bulk of our Herculean efforts are keel-hauled before our very eyes.

I'm a painter, I'm an artist. I take things too far sometimes. I really need some comfort.

If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.

No one wanted to hire me. No newspaper, television station, television network that I worked for ever wanted to hire me.

Writers talk about the agony of writing; I talk about the agony of not writing.

The life of an artist is not all glamorous. It's a lot of work. A lot of people think that it's very easy.

I applied for a job at Starbucks. One of the questions was, 'Why do you want to work at Starbucks?' Uh, because my life is in shambles.