The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.
Interpretation
Being an artist often brings a constant sense of dissatisfaction or unhappiness.
This quote by J. D. Salinger suggests that the life of an artist is fraught with a unique kind of unhappiness that stems from the relentless pursuit of creativity and expression. Such emotional turmoil can stem from the pressure to create, the fear of inadequacy, and the struggle to find one's voice, leading artists to experience a persistent sense of dissatisfaction with themselves and their work.
In practice
Referencing this quote during a discussion about the emotional challenges artists face.
Against my better judgment I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there's a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.
I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete — that's what scares me. That's why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.
Each of his phrases was rather like a little ancient island, inundated by a miniature sea of whiskey.
My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. he was left handed. The thing that was descriptive about it though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up to bat
Who in the Bible besides Jesus knew--knew--that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look?
You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won't wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she'll hear you.
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
There are artists who delight listeners with their wild and daring individuality; there are others who uncover the written score with reverence. There are few who can do both.
The only way artists can do things is to do it for themselves. Trying to second guess what the public wants or likes is kind of a fool's game.
People like to say that my work is about making the invisible visible, but that's a misunderstanding. It's about showing what invisibility looks like.
I come from the place where I am thinking 'I have put my blood on the pages.'
When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.
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