Creative Hardship Quotes

Lyrics are really, really hard, I think, or at least they're really hard for me. Some people can channel lyrics faster. I find them very hard to find, so because of it, they take me a long time, and I really think about them.

Writing must certainly be one of the hardest professions - writing and painting.

Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!

Being an artist is not easy - I have always said that to the students I have taught over the years. It's a huge sacrifice.

It's sweet to hear, but anyone who says that they want to be the next John Cassavetes is crazy. He had it so tough. No one would want to walk a step in his shoes. Believe me - I wouldn't.

'One With You' was the hardest book I have ever written. I rewrote it three times.

The Artist," an ancient sage had once said, "is always sitting on the doorsteps of the rich.

Every album is difficult. If it was easy, we'd make one a month.

Poetry is the arithmetic of the easiest way and the primrose path, matched up with foam-flanked horses, bloody knuckles, and bones, on the hard ways to the stars.

Art is difficult, transient is her reward.

America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter or musician. To be a rabbit is better still.

Well, life isn't a cakewalk, is it?! Eighty-nine percent of the world's most valuable art was created by men living in rat-infested flats. You think Velásquez wore Adidas? You think he enjoyed the luxuries of central heating and twenty-four-hour pizza delivery?!

It's a hard thing to be an artist and not give up.

How hard, how desperately hard, is the way of the experimenter in art!

If all you boast of your great art be true; Sure, willing poverty lives most in you.

I've always known that writing plays is very difficult, because I've written three or four that have never been produced.

When you consider all the writers who never even had a machine. Who would have given an eyeball for a good typewriter. Any typewriter. All the ones who wrote on a matchbook covers. Paper bags. Toilet paper. Who had their writing destroyed by their jailers. Who persisted beyond all odds.

Each work seems to give me the most trouble at the time I'm working on it.

It took me five or six years to write 'How Should a Person Be?' and there were many times when I felt discouraged.

To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It's forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there's a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.

Writing is not the easiest way to make a living. Your work long hours, usually all by yourself. It is not a way to make money.

I scored one film by myself, which was the hardest thing I think I've ever done.

All good books wind up, I think, with the writer getting his teeth bashed in.

I paint by all the daylight we have and that is little enough, less perhaps than you have by much... imagine to yourself how a purl must look through a burnt glass.