Here we have someone who clearly practices little real science, as evident by the ease with which they speak absolute statements that apply extremely broadly.
But your original statement was far too broad:
> there is not a scientist, artist, researcher or writer who is not driven by funding.
There are absolutely members from every one of those subsets driven by curiousity.
(In my own life, I have reached out to labs in completely different fields than my own to help publish out of nothing more than pure curiosity.)