Wealth & Money Quote by Jackie Collins

Collins is smuggling a hard-edged piece of career advice into the packaging of a dream. She pivots from the vague, sugary language of aspiration ("achieve your dreams") to a practical command ("follow them"), then quietly redefines what counts as a dream in the first place. It isn't the blunt, culturally approved goal of getting rich; it's the less defensible, harder-to-explain impulse to do the work you actually want. That turn is the quote's real engine: she treats wealth as a distracting proxy, not a destination.

The subtext is suspicious of status. "Very rich" reads like a trap set by other people's fantasies, a number you can chase forever without ever having to decide who you are. By contrast, "doing something that you really want to do" demands taste, appetite, and nerve. It's also Collins telegraphing how careers in the creative industries are built: not by obsessing over the scoreboard, but by committing to a voice, a genre, a subject matter that might get you dismissed before it gets you paid.

Context matters. Collins made her name writing glossy, sexually frank, high-drama novels that were routinely sneered at by literary gatekeepers and devoured by readers. For someone who turned a stigmatized kind of ambition into a global brand, this isn't naive anti-money moralizing. It's a knowing claim that the straightest line to commercial success is often the crooked one: focus on the thing you can't not do, and let the riches, if they come, arrive as a side effect rather than a steering wheel.