Rudyard Kipling Quotes

Don't make music for some vast, unseen audience or market or ratings share or even for something as tangible as money. Though it's crucial to make a living, that shouldn't be your inspiration. Do it for yourself.

You cannot live to please everyone else. You have to edify, educate and fulfill your own dreams and destiny, and hope that whatever your art is that you're putting out there, if it's received, great, I respect you for receiving it. If it's not received, great, I respect you for not.

My work is trying to at least define myself on my own terms, and then if other people enjoy things that's a lovely addition.

Satisfying myself is the point in filmmaking, in my mind.

If people would like to come to my concerts I'd love them to come. And if they like the music that I make, I love that too. But I do not make music for other people. I make it to please myself.

I don't have any ambition to make lots of money or win an Oscar or anything like that. It's not about that for me.

It's not always about huge giant commercial success. It's about art.

I like to receive money for my work. But I can pass that up this time. I like to have people know my work is done by me. But I can pass that up. I like to have tenants made happy by my work. But that doesn't matter too much. The only thing that matters, my goal, my reward, my beginning, my end is the work itself. My work done my way. Peter, there's nothing in the world that you can offer me, except this. Offer me this and you can have anything I've got to give. My work done my way. A private, personal, selfish, egotistical motivation. That's the only way I function. That's all I am.

From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.

I’m not trying to satisfy anybody but myself and the role that I’m playing.

I try to please myself. I don't try to anticipate what people want to see.

All any artist can do is please themselves.

I never think about what others are doing. I do a film for myself, not others.

That's the very definition of freedom: to be allowed to develop our own creative potential to the fullest. But it doesn't have to be in the arts, obviously. In my case, I gravitated toward the arts.

I've hit a point where my big luxury is getting to work on the things I want to work on. That's my hobby. It's being able to do a movie like 'Chef,' where you don't get paid, where you get paid scale, but you get to do exactly the movie you want to do. To me, that's worth more to me than whatever money I would have gotten paid.

I don't make decisions for money or popularity. I do things because they're right for me, and they're interesting and challenging.

I only write music for myself, I don't try and appeal to anyone else.

I've never made a movie to make money. I've never made a painting to make money.

I'll always take an artistic endeavor over a career move.

I don't believe that artists really are interested in money. That's not the motivation for art.

I've learned to take jobs as an actress that is meaningful to me because I've never taken a job for the money.

With my designs and my ideas, I want to please myself first.

I care so much about making things that are useful for people to have and listen to, but I don't care so much that I won't do whatever the hell I want. It's just one of those things.

I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.

Art is a revolt against fate. All art is a revolt against man's fate.