Amanda Palmer

There's a huge cloud of shame around art and business being seen as bedfellows. ”

One of the best things about Kickstarter and crowdfunding and the collapse of the music business is a lot of artists like me have been forced to face our own weird mess about ourselves and what we thought it meant to become musicians. ”

Neil Gaiman swooped into my life though another friend, Jason Webley, who knew we were fans of each other's work and introduced us via email. Neil and I, like me and Ben, just hit it off instantly. ”

I've always been a creative workaholic. I have never had a period of my life where I didn't have at least half a dozen projects going on at once. ”

I think to say that meditation is helpful to artists is true and it's great, but it's also essentially helpful to any kind of process of, just, life. ”

I was just a very dark kid. My family was complicated. ”

Meditation, especially for people who don't know very much about it and think it's this very hippy dippy thing, can really be powerful, terrifying even, as it lifts the rug up on your subconscious and the dust comes flying out. ”

I suppose I'm happy to sell my time and energy, but I'm not happy to sell my initial creative time. ”

Crowdfunding as an idea itself isn't new - bands have been doing it since the dawn of time. ”

I see everybody arguing about what the value of music should be instead of what I think the bigger conversation is, which is that music has value, it's subjective and we're moving to a new era where the audience is taking more responsibility for supporting artists at whatever level. ”