Chris Rea Quotes

I love to work. It's the idea of having someone else tell you how to make your film or how to sell it - that's the part I can't really deal with. I would rather do 1,000 things that are work than deal with one thing that's a political problem.

I've been fortunate that I can be selective enough to do acting when it's really furthering what I want to do with my life.

I have never been assigned a game, I have never made a game I didn't want to make. I've never done anything just to make somebody some money.

All the artists out there, I ask you and beg you: Take over your ship. It's your career. It's your life.

I always say I want creative control. A lot of people don't think about that. And that's what every artist should think of - being creative and not just a puppet.

I used to get in trouble with my old agent, because I've never been driven by fear or need or greed. I want my work to represent me as a person, so I can be quite fussy.

I'm a working actress able to make choices based on characters rather than what I 'should' do for my career.

I have worried about getting pigeon-holed, but now I think I've done enough weird, offbeat stuff not to be. And I also know that I do things for the right reasons: I've made my money, so I don't have to say yes to anything.

My goal was, and still is, to write first, direct my own stuff whenever possible and control my own creative destiny.

I don't want to be doing movies that I don't want to do. They take so much out of you.

I am in that glorious position where I can redesign and re-package my own work.

I don't want money to ever drive my career. I want my career to be driven by what I want to do in art.

People send me records, and if don't like them, I won't do them; I don't care how much money you offer.

Stand up for yourself and fight for your right to be the artist that you want to be. There's plenty of pressure from outside; people tell you how to dress and how to sing or what to sing, but I always felt like if I'm going to fail or succeed, I want to do it on my own terms.

I'm not here to put my music out on the Internet with no support and then say I got creative freedom. I've got creative freedom wherever I go: I don't create anything that I don't want to create. That's freedom. Since when does a company force you to make something that you don't want to make? If they do that, you leave.

I can only control what I can, which is what I'm able to do as an artist.

I don't want to plan my career. That would be a business plan. Filmmaking is not a business plan.

It wasn't slung together by a producer and a publisher. We decided we were going to take hold of our music and let it evolve organically.

Young people have realised that an artist is in charge of what they're doing - this crazy cynicism that artists were puppets has disappeared.

It's a pretty great thing to have a record that at the end of the day you're not totally sick of and you're actually proud of. We're pretty lucky, because a lot of bands come out with their first record on a label and they're forced to make decisions they might not stand behind because someone's telling them it's a good idea. We didn't have to do that. I think that's one of the things I'm most thankful for.

We have access to more resources in general, and they are not going to force a situation on us, whether its the producer, or the cover, or what songs we have to play. And it's a small enough company that it seems like the people there care about music and not just about business.

I don't want to move over to Beverly Hills. My goal is to make the movies I want to make and support the people I want to support. That's it.

I think as an artist or a writer it's OK to want to control your own work.

When it came to my art, I went my own way and did not follow the trends.

It's thought of as an eccentric thing for an actor to really try to maintain quality control through the whole career. Most people think, 'You just work. You just keep working.' And in some ways I wish I could be a guy who's just a workhorse.