I'd heard stories about business managers who lost their client's money. My feeling was that if I made any money, I wanted to lose it myself, to be the author of my own demise.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I had a job, I got ill, I left the job to get better, and while I was getting better, I wrote some stories. I sent them to some publishers and the fifth one who replied said they'd take them. Then they went bankrupt. Then that bankrupt publisher got bought by a bigger firm. Story: in the end is the beginning, and in the beginning is the end.
When I work for someone else, I always make money for them. When I back my own ideas, I am bound to lose.
My father realised that for me to become a publisher in his firm would have been the end of the firm!
I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.
As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.
Money? How did I lose it? I never did lose it. I just never knew where it went.
I was forced to be an artist and a CEO from the beginning, so I was forced to be like a businessman because when I was trying to get a record deal, it was so hard to get a record deal on my own that it was either give up or create my own company.
I'd rather lose my own money than someone else's.
In every business I had ever started, even ones that had totally failed, I had kept good relations with the investors.
I made my money turning around distressed or bankrupt companies. I did 50-some of them in my career... I started on a shoestring and eventually built up quite a fortune.