Elfriede Jelinek Quotes

I am very grateful for the success, because it has given me the freedom to write without pressure, in my own way, and has enabled me to maintain my family and educate my children and grandchildren, as well as to create a Foundation to empower women and girls.

The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.

I really think it is possible to make a very nice living by writing and not worrying about anything else.

Something that bothered people about 'Dawson's Creek' but as a writer, I kind of dug: writing those kids as though they were college grad students. It was fun and liberating and made for a true sort of writer's show. It was a fun year for me, because I got to get out of debt with my first TV job, and I learned a ton.

It's tempting to just write a comic called 'Everyone Mail Randall Munroe Twenty Bucks' - maybe it would work, and I could just close down the 'xkcd' store and sit on a beach and draw pictures and make snarky Reddit posts for the rest of my life.

I used to say when I was working in the theater that if I ever had five seasons of a hit TV show I'd never have to worry about money and wouldn't have to do anything I didn't want to do.

I don't particularly care how many records we sell any more because we've kind of bought all the equipment we want to buy.

I wouldn't think a blues album would be that commercially successful, but I don't really care. I'd do it for the love of blues, not for the money. I've got plenty of money.

When you're kept by a patron you don't have to duke it out in the media marketplace for dollars and for readers. In some ways that's a blessing because it takes a lot of pressure off you.

Fortunately, now I've got myself in a position where things are about story and not money. In my earlier career, it was more about getting my foot in the door and to get enough money to live, to be perfectly honest.

I've been lucky, I've had movies that made a lot of money, so I don't feel like I have to kill every time out. I don't want that pressure. I don't need it.

Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.

Work to me has become kind of a hobby. I was a part of something that gave me financial independence and the rent is paid. Now it's just about projects that turn me on.

You want to strike that happy medium: the balance of being able to find creative satisfaction in your profession, be able to afford a roof over your head, but still have the freedom to live a relatively normal life.

Because modeling is lucrative, I'm able to save up and be more particular about the acting roles I take.

One of the towering people in this industry said, why don't you go and make a five-year contract with somebody, make yourself several million dollars and put it away, then go and do whatever you want, work for public TV if you want.

You must avoid giving hostages to fortune, like getting an expensive wife, an expensive house, and a style of living that never lets you aford the time to take the chance to write what you wish.

There's the concept that if I do this big budget project, then that will help me do the things I really want to do and bring more money to those films.

I just want real creative freedom without worrying about, you know, car payments.

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.

The best piece of advice I ever got from anyone was when Spike Jonze said, 'Take money out of the equation.' And that's actually when Vice started making lots of money. That's when I stopped worrying about money and started worrying about what I wanted to do.

My writing became more and more minimalist. In the end, I couldn't write at all. For seven or eight years, I hardly wrote. But then I had a revelation. What if I did the opposite? What if, when a sentence or a scene was bad, I expanded it, and poured in more and more? After I started to do that, I became free in my writing.

When the first big paycheque with 'Dumb And Dumber' hit, I went: 'Gosh, I wonder if this will affect my performance. Will I do a take and think, was that worth $7 million?' But that never happened. If anything, it made me rebel against that thing when people who get rich start playing it safe.

The success of 'Scrubs' allowed me to pursue anything I felt passionately about without having to worry about money. It allowed me to spend my summer work shopping my show at a nonprofit theater.

Well, it gives me the opportunity to make the movies that I want to do, because L'Oreal pays me very well. Also it means that I can work with great directors. My last commercial was directed by Erick Zonca, who made 'Dream Life of Angels.' And finally, it doesn't take up a lot of my time.