Wealth & Money Quote by Richard O'Brien

There’s a small act of defiance tucked into Richard O’Brien’s tidy denial. “I’ve never been driven by fame or money” isn’t just a modesty line; it’s a boundary-setting move from someone whose signature work has been swallowed by the very machinery he claims not to serve. O’Brien helped birth The Rocky Horror Show, a property that mutated into a cult-industrial ecosystem of midnight screenings, costumes, sing-alongs, and merch. When a creation becomes a brand, the creator gets recast as either a savvy profiteer or a hostage to their own legacy. This quote tries to refuse both roles.

The phrasing matters. He doesn’t say he’s immune to fame and money; he says they were “never…part of my psyche.” That’s a psychological alibi, not an economic one. It frames ambition as temperament rather than choice, a way to sidestep the accusation that success inevitably reveals a hunger for status. The repetition of “never” does PR work too: it’s emphatic enough to sound like he’s answering a question he’s heard before, maybe one loaded with skepticism.

Coming from an actor and writer whose career is associated with flamboyance and spectacle, the understatement is also a kind of punchline. O’Brien’s public persona has always played with performance and artifice; here he performs sincerity. The subtext reads like a reminder: the weirdos, the outsiders, the DIY glam of Rocky Horror weren’t engineered for profit. They were engineered for release. Fame happened to it, not because of it.