The price an artist pays for doing what he wants is that he has to do it.

The reality of how America functions is it's hard to be an artist, period. It's really undervalued work. You have to convince so many people to like what you are doing before you can do it all the time. That's a real barrier, and it's scary and seems impossible. For a long time, I had, like, three strips a week running on various websites and I wasn't getting paid for any of it. The Nib was the first paid work ever got. It's important, I think, to step back and think, "Oh man, I managed to do this." Now I'm doing it full time. And it is unserious and unprofitable, but at least I'm happy with it.

Art is a hideously painful business, you know. Pity me! Or at least buy me a drink.

The work that I’m making happens, stylistically, because of all the financial restrictions that I have to go through in order to make it. Sometimes I hustle, I ask for favours. Sometimes I’m using a lesser kind of grade of material, but I know it’s like that because of the necessity of having the work made. That adds a richness to the work.

If the government has the money put aside to help out artists, why can't they just do so?

The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.

I can bear this - that I am not the young wild guy [as he was in the 1970's]. I hope that the lust to work doesn't leave me. That would be sad. I am glad to get honors and high prices. But artists are valued today in terms of money, auctions. I wish society would need art more, but it doesn't. So I feel very lonely in this culture.

Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring.

A successful artist of any kind has to work so hard that she is justified in refusing to lay down her sceptre until she is placed on the bier.

Mercenaries work for money. Missionaries build for others. Artists create for themselves.

My dream was to be an artist and to earn enough money to survive from my art … I realized that I would have to risk it at some point, or end up spending the rest of my life wondering whether I could make it

You are up against what people will always call the ways of the world - and the ways of this country, which does not kill artists so much as it kills the rationale for art, in part by insisting that the artist must be a successful member of the middle class, if not a celebrity, to be a successful artist. And that to do otherwise is to fail art, the country and yourself. Should you decide that writing is your way to serve your country, or to defend it, you are almost always writing about the one it could become.

Bosboom has just as anyone else fussed around things [paintings] from time to time to get his money. Only very few people can escape this.. .It is almost impossible that an artist who doesn't have the gift to work for the market as well, will always have to make good things. Because, when he has no money he has to earn it. And he will have to strain himself. For something he appreciates the least of all. He can never neglect this.. .The examples you can see everywhere. If you may write something about him [Bosboom] again, I hope you will take this into account too. (translation from the original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek)

Because I'm a person who always has to do something. If I cannot do anything, I'm in a very bad way. But really I'm always working on something. And I always want to work, too. Well, the few artists I know really well, they are all so.. .It's a really bad block when you think, right, now I've got to do art. It really is very important to learn that that is not the most important thing.