Patty Jenkins Quotes

I admire actresses who are willing to jettison the easy route toward exposure and commercial success as an actor in favor or a slow burn, choosing projects carefully, and building an artistic practice over time that feels specific to who they are as artists.

There is an incredible love in creating art unless somebody is saying, 'Hey, let's just make money,' because it doesn't work when you do it that way. If you are aiming for that, forget it.

In the music industry, we value large success. I realized that while I would like that, that it's not what my writing is about. And if I start making it about that, it becomes impure.

Selling another 10 million albums is not a priority. Putting out something you're proud of is.

I'd rather sell 10,000 records that represent me than 2 million that don't represent me at all.

I would rather write or record something great and have it overlooked than do mediocre work and have it be popular.

Despite whatever commercial kind of success you might have or radio success, I don't want to do something just to get as many people as possible to listen.

I try to keep away from being big-headed. That's what causes people to lose the acting thing. They start being commercial, and then they stink for the rest of their lives.

All I tell artists is, 'Do what you love. Never let anybody talk you into changing what your musical idea is just to try to get a hit, because you're chasing your tail that way. It's not going to happen, and if you're successful, you have to do it the rest of your life. Stay true to it and do it for the sake of the art.'

I ask myself all the time, 'Why keep doing this?' If I wasn't exploring or finding something to write about that was personal or meant something, there'd be no reason. If I was ever making a record just to make a record, or ever just like, 'Just put something out there that someone will buy,' I would quit.

I never want to record something that I'm not proud of just because I think it might be a big hit. There's no positive about that because if you record a song you hate and it's a big hit, then you're singing a song every night that you hate. And if you record a song that you hate and it isn't a hit, then you sold out for no reason.

I don't necessarily go out and try to do something that's going to be just something that will please the audience. I'm not interested in doing something where I get the most people to come see the movie at the same time and they get the biggest explosion. I'm not interested in that.

I want to continue acting as long as I feel right about it.

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

Beware the mediocrity that threatens middle age, its limitation of thought and interest, its dullness of fancy, its too external life, and mental thinness.

I would rather spend my entire life doing nothing than have my name attached to something mediocre.

I think no matter what you do, a certain amount of people are going to call you a sellout, somehow, you know. If I ever start trying to make a living on it.

... one doesn't want to read badly any more than live badly, since time will not relent. I don't know that we owe God or nature a death, but nature will collect anyway, and we certainly owe mediocrity nothing, whatever collectivity it purports to advance or at least represent.

The idea of being in a hugely successful movie that I don't like would be just as bad as being in a film that I love that no one sees. I wouldn't want the kind of success that felt cheap or that I didn't own.

Do not set out to write with your eyes on the box office. It can't be done.

It is fatal for art if it is forced into official respectability and condemned to sterile mediocrity.

I figure as an artist the best thing you can do is follow your heart - and if your heart is marketable, then you win.

I'm just happy that I'm able to take care of what I need to take care of, live, and do the thing that I love the most and that is to sing. People want to hear it, buy it, see it, hold it, record it, bootleg it. It's fine with me as long as it's good but when it's bad I'm in trouble!

I don't really care about making a big movie - I just want to make good ones.

You know, you should start to be in plays and things like that. Write some scripts. If you're an artist and you truly don't believe what you're spittin' then you need to really seriously be an actor then.