Art is also an expression of the Divine. Everything beautiful, virtuous, and truthful is an expression of the Divine.

You have to have time for yourself, to think, to be yourself again, to be within yourself, to develop your inner quality, to remember your inner quality - to be like an artist, like a very leisurely person, very loving, stress free, then you can give. If you don't know pleasure, you can't give pleasure; if you don't have peace, you can't give peace.

The survival standard in this world is very demanding. Not every one can afford to have leisure time to think for himself. Many artistic people, many artists, are buried under this material survival instinct; they cannot go beyond.

That's why the real artists have to sacrifice. Most of them live in poverty, except Picasso, that lucky guy. Most of the artists live in poverty till the day they die. And after they die, their art works make other people become billionaires, or millionaires at least. Then people start to appreciate their work; I don't know why. But those artists, if they have become rich or if they have made money in other ways, they couldn't be inspired to produce such timeless masterpieces. For that they have to sacrifice a lot. They live in misery, sometimes lacking a lot of material comforts in order to have this inspiration. And that is why most of the art is miserable, depicting some kind of melancholy expression. This also is colored by the artist's feeling at that time.

And most people are more inspired when they are in dire circumstances, and not when they are too happy. When you are happy, it's very difficult to write poetry or to paint something that is long lasting. I don't know why. If you are happy, you don't even bother to paint. Only when you have so much time and nothing to do, girl friend gone, boy friend left or something, then you sit there and you feel the urge to do something. And most of the time in these circumstances, masterpieces are born - songs, poetry, or paintings. This is a pity, though. But in higher societies, they don't need all this misery to produce masterpieces because they have a lot of time to be happy and a lot of time to be pensive.