In setting up a business under the name and meaning of the Golden Rule, I was publicly binding myself, in my business relations, to a principle which had been a real and intimate part of my family upbringing. Our idea was to make money and build business through serving the community with fair dealing and honest value.
I was blessed. I had a great childhood and great parents that loved music and family. I moved from England when I was almost 18 and been on my own ever since and have been trying to make a living in the music business for the past twelve years. A lot of people say I'm an overnight success, but it's an overnight success that's been twelve years in the making.
Growing up in a very big family, working together and playing together, that is something that has been part of my life since ever I was born. It has advantages and disadvantages. It's like an older style of living where everyone works in the family business.
I'm thankful to God for having a family that's been there for me. He's been there from the time I was a child to even now with my family helping with my little boy. It's worth more than words could ever describe. That's one of the ways I've been able to stay grounded is thanks to family and God.
I don't think I ever dreamt of going into business. No one in my family was in business.
Nashville was totally different than I ever dreamed. I had only seen the music business on television and been to a couple of concerts. I had no clue.
No family of an American hostage has ever been prosecuted for paying a ransom for the return of their loved ones. The last thing we should ever do is to add to a family's pain.
Had I been brighter, the ladies been gentler, the Scotch been weaker, had the gods been kinder, had the dice been hotter, this could have been a one-sentence story: Once upon a time I lived happily ever after.
I love my Fender Rhodes. It's been a part of my family since that keyboard came out, and I've had it reworked so that it's in the best condition it's actually ever been in. That is my baby.
I feel like I've been lucky that I've never been put in a situation where I had to keep a serious secret. But what is true of me - and has to be true of everyone who's ever been in a family - is that our idealization of reality when we're children always has to fall apart. It's the narratives we didn't know about that pop up and redraw reality. You have to be able to integrate secrets into who you are. My family does not look now like it does when I was a kid. There was divorce. There were family secrets. There was definitely a difference between what I thought was true and what was true.
A few years ago, I was trying to buy a piece of land next to a house I had in Newfoundland. I discovered that the plot had been owned by a family, and the son had gone off to World War I and been killed. It began to interest me: What would have happened on that land if the son had lived, had brought up his own family there?
Satan has been the best friend the Church has ever had, as He has kept it in business all these years!
But Gregor understood easily that it was not only consideration for him which prevented their moving, for he could easily have been transported in a suitable crate with a few air holes; what mainly prevented the family from moving was their complete hopelessness and the thought that they had been struck by a misfortune as none of their relatives and acquaintances had ever been hit.
No one in my family had ever been in politics. My dad thought it was something that got in the way.
He was about to go home, about to return to the place where he had had a family. It was in Godric’s Hollow that, but for Voldemort, he would have grown up and spent every school holiday. He could have invited friends to his house. . . . He might even have had brothers and sisters. . . . It would have been his mother who had made his seventeenth birthday cake. The life he had lost had hardly ever seemed so real to him as at this moment, when he knew he was about to see the place where it had been taken from him.
My family and I have been blessed with good fortune in the world of business. We've created quite a net worth. My children, two boys, have more money than they will ever need, and they aren't empire builders.