David Brown's interview with Arlen Riley Wilson

Her final interview before passing in 1999.

David Brown's interview with Arlen Riley Wilson

What I have learned is that life is an unqualified good, and living should be unqualified and unmodified...

But the secret of a well-balanced life is to appreciate everything, or at least as much as you can. Many people fall into imbalance and disharmony. There's no doubt about it, having enough money is a unqualified good. But if you decide that having a lot of money is the only good thing then you're in big bad trouble. Then you forget to look at nature, and you forget to look at your friend's faces. You forget to enjoy animals, and you just forget too much. So the thing is to spread the appreciation around.

...I'd like to see a world with more artistic and creatively flowing civilizations, but this is tremendously difficult at present. I knew a lot of painters and other artists in New York years ago. Many of them lived on very little. I knew one first-rate painter who lived on something like $1.36 a day, that he had from a minor stock investment twenty years before. I'm not suggesting that you rush madly to start fasting, but we should be aware that we could live on a fraction of what we consume.