The thing is, if you're going to take the artistic path, you sort of have to make peace with the idea or the possibility that you may never make any money or get any acknowledgment or accolades for what you're doing.
I mean, Dodd-Frank is strangling small community banks. It doesn't make any difference what the interest rate is. They're not - they're not going to loan the money because they can't make any money for one thing plus the cost of compliance.
Hollywood is a business and movie studios are only going to do what's going to make money. It's not an altruistic thing. They are blatant grabs for money. Responsible studios want to make quality pictures, but at the same time nobody is going to make quality pictures they know aren't going to make any money.
I hung around hippie-ish kind of people and, first of all, they never made any money. If you never make any money, you never have to declare any profession!
When I was a kid, I never thought I would ever be able to make records and never really thought seriously about a musical career because a musical career was being Fabian or Frankie Avalon or something. It didn't make any sense. There wasn't any possibility to get into that world.
A lot of artists were members of the artistic union. It gave you the possibility to buy paints, canvases, brushes, even the possibility to get a studio if you had the money to build it. It also gave you the possibility to make your living by making official art and then you would get a lot of "official" commissions: portraits, paintings, murals, etc.
For people who make inventions, whether they make scientific inventions or artistic inventions, they're driven by pretty much the same thing. It's some mistrust from somebody saying it couldn't be a certain way, and overthrowing that. But that can happen at any point in history, at any time you come along. It doesn't get better or worse because you're born in this era or that era - I think it's more individualistic. It comes from within, you know, it's an internal thing.
You can't survive if you don't make money. But as far as I'm concerned, we never, ever make a product with the idea that we'd make a lot of money. We make products because we're inspired by the idea that people will love it.
B17 is becoming more difficult to get because the FDA is cracking down on people dealing with B17 because, after all, doctors don't get any money off of this - it's a vitamin. And they [doctors] make a lot of money when you're sick, they don't make any money when you are well. The Bible says the love of money is the root of all evil.
If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done from the mere transfer of possession; he may not feel the loss, or it may prevent him from using the money badly. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself dishonest.
A lot of athletes go from not making any money at all to make any large pot of money. Then they get approached by an agent who takes a percentage. Then they get approached by your financial advisor who starts investing your money without you even understanding what he's doing.
Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying No to any authority - literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political.
One of the tax systems in the US is for wage earners. The government takes money from them out of each paycheck - so it knows how much they make, and those workers can't cheat to any significant degree. But the other tax system is for capital. Those with capital get to tell the government what they want to tell. They may get audited, but if their tax returns are of any size the government doesn't have enough of the smart auditors to figure out what's really going on. And there are the rules that allow you to do things like take in money today and pay taxes on it thirty years from now.
What I'd tell any kid in high school is, 'Take business classes.' I don't care what else you're gonna do; if you're gonna do art or anything, take business classes. You can say, 'Well, I don't want to get commercial,' but if you do anything to make any money, you're doing something commercial.
Any time you turn off and let someone else make any artistic decision for you, you make a mistake.
What matters is that you enjoy doing something creative. And I'm more and more seeing that as the key. That success and money or any sort of accolades are really not the experience of the journey. It's all about the process of building something.
Put your whole energy into meditation. Once you are centered in your being, once you know the inner path, then wherever you are you can manage to go to the center without any difficulty. Even when you are dying, it will not make any difference. You may be sick, it will not make any difference.