Wealth & Money Quote by Frank Leslie

A blunt sentence like this lands less as confession than as a defensive perimeter: Frank Leslie draws a hard border around himself with money as the battleground and “nothing” as the weapon. The repetition of “they” is doing quiet work, too. It turns unnamed people into a faceless mass, a chorus of opportunists, which lets the speaker dodge specifics and keep the accusation broad enough to be unassailable. If you can’t identify the claim, you can’t disprove it.

The phrasing is tellingly transactional. “Only after my money” reduces every interaction to extraction, and “nothing for me” flips the expected complaint (they don’t care about me) into a colder verdict (they are nothing). That inversion signals injured pride as much as caution: it’s easier to devalue others than to admit you misjudged them. The line reads like the emotional logic of someone who has been repeatedly “handled” in social or professional settings - praised, invited, flattered - with the suspicion that affection is just a delivery system for a request.

Coming from an artist, the context sharpens. Creative careers often blur intimacy and commerce: patrons, collaborators, gallerists, hangers-on, friends who become managers, admirers who become invoices. Success creates a strange marketplace around the self, where your personality is part of the product. Leslie’s quote is a refusal to be consumed that also exposes the loneliness that can follow visibility: when your value is publicly priced, trust starts to feel like bad accounting.