Jimmy Wales Quotes

I continue to write. It's just one of those things that I do. I'll have periods when I write and periods when I don't. But you don't want it to become a discipline really. If it becomes a discipline, it becomes a chore and that's no good.

If you think art is a competitive forum, then you're going to stop doing it if you're not good. But if it's not competitive, it's something that you'll keep doing.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

The book is first and foremost something I made for myself.

I think my stance and my way of life is my most important art.

I may not get the opportunity to make movies for my whole life, but I'm going to make movies for the rest of my life. Maybe studios won't pay for it, but I'm going to do it because I love it. So, I just have to be proud of what I make, and what I'm trying to say in what I make. If people don't like it or people don't see it, that's beyond what I can control. I'm a storyteller, and people are going to listen or not and like it or not. That's only solidified over time.

I write a song because I want to. I think the moment you start writing it to make money, you're starting to kill yourself artistically.

I think everyone is always asking themselves, How is my work meaningful, how is my life meaningful? As I get older, I feel like who I am as a person and a citizen is more important than who I am in my work. But I do think it reframed slightly for me, how much I have to care about a project in order to want to do it. Sometimes, obviously, you have a take a job for money. But I think I'm quicker now when I get a script that's, say, borderline misogynist, I'm not going to go in for it. I'm thinking more about what I'm putting into the world.

I realized in the early days I just didn't edit at all. But I think you become a little more cagey with your lyrics when you know more people are going to hear them and make assumptions about you as a person. Realizing that, you want to be a little more opaque.

I just like to do work that inspires me, and I don't pay any attention to whether it's a high- or low-budget movie.

I have a desire to create more film, more beauty, more art, more love, but I don't feel desperate. It's not about creating or building a career.

I never wanted to dilute my private passion for the art by airing and arguing it in public.

I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota.

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.

If you are living a life that feels right to you, if you're willing to take creative chances or a creative path that feels like it's mostly in keeping with your sensibilities, you know, aesthetic and artistic, then that's what matters.

Any artist that's involved in their work is inevitably going to have a focus in what they do.

Being essentially a creator, I never set out to shock, always thinking about creating my work and not about the benefits it could produce.

Even though what I do does enter the market, it doesn't interest me. I am exclusively concerned with the formal qualities of my work. It is about the need and the right to self-expression.

I don't write for a particular audience. I work as an artist, and I think the audience of one, which is the self, and I have to satisfy myself as an artist. So I always say that I write for the same people that Picasso painted for. I think he painted for himself.

I can see me continuing to make the best music I can, and let the chips fall where they may.

I suppose we'll make money off our album and our singles and stuff, but, like, they were made as we wanted them, exactly with what we had to say, and done exactly how we wanted them, right? And, like, we didn't put them out to make money. We put them out because we wanted to do them, do you know what I mean?

It has always been important to me to be a creative artist, not to be a star, not to be rich, not to be famous.

I like being able to own things, to not have to depend on music to support myself. Music hadn't supported me since 2000. I mean, it really hasn't. I just do it because I love doing it.

I consider myself first of all an artist. My work is about my creativity - why I create and not for whom.

When I was still doing indie, it was just purely art. I don't think about how much I will get paid or how much the movie will earn.