Sam Shepard Quotes

Most actors are not rich - they are very poor indeed. What keeps them going is that they just love the job.

Being a writer is a poverty trap. I mean, it's a terrible profession.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

Let me tell you something: I have members in my charter who, after paying their rent and house bills and taking care of their families, don't even have enough money left over to pay the fifteen dollars a week dues.

… there are a great many people who not only can make no budget but can barely manage to exist with their families on what they earn from day to day

You can work for 10 years without making it... we aren't actually all living in mansions.

Poverty of course is no disgrace, but it is damned annoying.

People can't live on $7.50 an hour.

My total year's income from working as hard as I possibly could from writing went from like $30 one year to about $70 the next year. And it made me realize that maybe you couldn't really pay the rent that way.

I'm basically a starving artist.

There's so little money in my bank account, my scenic checks show a ghetto.

Thousands of Ohio families are going deeper and deeper in debt just trying to pay their heating bills, fill prescriptions, and buy groceries. The current minimum wage is simply not enough.

My father was unemployed and I was the eldest of seven children. We were very poor. And when you ask how did we support ourselves, the only funding that we had was unemployment payments.

I got married when I was 16 so I had to do shift-work to make ends meet.

When I sent those scripts, that was the lowest point of my life. We'd just had our second son, and when I went to collect them from hospital, I went to the bank to try and get some money to buy some diapers, the screen showed I've got $26 left.

If you must know, my parents came from pretty hardscrabble backgrounds in the southern Midwest. I certainly didn't grow up poor, but I did spend my 20s and early 30s juggling temp jobs and choking on massive student-loan debt.

It's hard for me to understand how working-class people support themselves.

My son tried to work in films and he ultimately gave it up, he finally couldn't make a living, he couldn't support himself. He worked all the time and he didn't make enough money to have a house, have an apartment.

As someone who grew up in tough circumstances, I know that being on public assistance is not a spot that anyone wants to be in.

Somehow, the French got this idea of the starving artist. Very romantic, except it's not so romantic for the starving artist.

Poverty is not a disgrace, but it's terribly inconvenient.

I still have to work paycheck to paycheck. Being in show business doesn't indicate that you're a 'success,' in my opinion.

You know you poor when you eatin' breakfast food late. You fryin' toast? At nine o'clock at night? With bacon? You're broke.

I grew up in a very modest house. We were poor-we lived on the poverty level. We all got jobs as young kids.

I didn't have any extra money. But I can't say that I had a hard early career.