Quotes About Struggle

When you steal from an artist you are stealing their blood, sweat and tears.

I define "politics" as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.

Art is always about overcoming obstacles between the inner condition and the skill for expression.

Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.

grievance does not make for great art.

Art is both a vengeance against reality and a reconciliation with it.

It's so much of what art and creativity are, being able to confront your own demons. If you can do that, you can get through just about everything.

Somebody said us artists have trouble with success because art is derived from struggle. I disagree with that, because truely doing your art is success, whether you make money from it or not.

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, in so far as it stands ready against the accidental and the unforeseen, and is not apt to fall.

Art is many things but, directly or indirectly, it always describes the human condition.

I don't think we live in those times when great art comes out of great adversity.

For writers from working-class families, the making of art is cultural disenfranchisement, for we do not belong in literary circles and our writing rarely makes it back home.

Art and resistance are great together. That's what art's made for. Look at Vincent van Gogh: He didn't cut off his ear because he was selling well.

Despite all that I know rationally, and everything that I can put into words, I can say that I have difficulty giving up the notion of the nobility of art.

All of those art-based fields are similar in that they're all hard to make a living in and they all require an intense amount of training and discipline.

On many days, harder than the act of making the art itself is the act of sharing it and living in a culture that you know is built to tear you down.

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

To be able to do art, it was a luxury to me.

Only the poor can create art.

The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living.

I grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony.

Country music is a form letter. You fi ll in the blanks. You move from one broken heart to the next one and from this marriage to that divorce, from a beating here to a beating there.

I wish that the arts were better supported, and you can't say that enough times, but I also believe that whatever happens, artists will keep going.

Rock and roll cola wars, I can't take it any more.