But this post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it; art was still central, but now everyone had to think about making a living too, and they did so with a kind of scorn for money except as it allowed them to live the way they wanted to live. Meg Wolitzer
About This Quote

-The main difference between the world before college and after it is that everyone cares about money now. We’re not just about art anymore. We have to care about making a living. -Art defines who we are outside of our job, so when we get out of college, we have to learn how to relate to people outside of our art.

It’s humbling, but also liberating. The more you know yourself, the better you can take care of other people. The more you take responsibility for yourself, the easier it is to take responsibility for other people.

It’s one thing to be an artist; it’s something else entirely to be a friend or a parent or a business owner or a parent of children or a grandparent or a sibling or a lover or anything like that. -I’m not saying we lose all our passion for art when we’re in the real world; we don’t. But we do lose some of it and gain some new kinds of things and experiences and connections and understandings and ways of looking at things and seeing things and thinking about things that were previously unavailable to us when we were in school only because we were focused on school stuff during school time only.

When you don’t have time to think about anything else except school stuff, then school stuff becomes your world and all your energies go into that one place, so when you get into the real world, you find out that the real world is not at all like school stuff — in fact, it might even be much worse than what you ever imagined in the limited realm in which you thought about it in school — and so your priorities change drastically all around you in your life: You use what little energy you have left from being focused on school stuff to take care of yourself instead of focusing on school stuff; you focus on finding a job that allows you to support yourself instead of focusing on school stuff; you start paying attention to relationships instead of focusing on school stuff; etc, etc, etc....

Source: The Interestings

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  3. I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me. - Hunter S. Thompson
  4. God, how impossible life is without money. Nothing can ever overcome it, it's everything when it's anything. How can I write in peace with endless worries of money, money, money? (“Disappearing Act”) - Richard Matheson
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More Quotes By Meg Wolitzer
  1. I think having the knowledge, plus the experiences you've lived through, make you definitely not fragile. They make you brave.
  2. No one had told her this would happen, that her girlishness would give way to the solid force of wifehood, motherhood. The choices available were all imperfect. If you chose to be with someone, you often wanted to be alone. If you chose to be...
  3. People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.
  4. But, she knew, you didn’t have to marry your soulmate, and you didn’t even have to marry an Interesting. You didn’t always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be...
  5. But this post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it; art was still central, but now everyone had to think about making a living too, and they did so with a kind of scorn for money except as it allowed them to...
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