I’m not interested in money. I just want to be wonderful.

In the first part of his profile, Martin interviews studio personnel about Monroe. An unnamed member of Fox’s legal staff recalls advising her to sign a contract before the year ended to save money; he says she answered with these words and left. Martin then asks other people why the studio took her back after her departure for New York.

In the reported exchange, artistic ambition matters more to her than a financially advantageous contract date.

Often presented as a free-standing declaration that she rejected money altogether. The contemporary evidence is narrower: a studio employee’s recollection of a particular contract conversation, printed by Martin, rather than a recorded statement or a text she wrote.

Money

• ‘Men work together.’ I told him from the heart, ‘Whether they work together or apart.’ Robert Frost
• I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become. (misattributed) Carl Gustav Jung
• I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they’re right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together. (not found)
• I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. Henry David Thoreau
• Music is the only religion that really delivers the goods. Frank Zappa

• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Marilyn_Monroe

Marilyn Monroe, Pete Martin, The New Marilyn Monroe, part one, The Saturday Evening Post, 5 May 1956; republished by the magazine in April 2016. Checked at Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/i-just-want-to-be-wonderful/ (26 October 2026).

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