“A good joke will sell quicker than a good poem, and, measured in sweat and blood, will bring better remuneration.”

— Jack London

"Getting into Print", first published in 1903 in The Editor magazine
Context: Fiction pays best of all and when it is of fair quality is more easily sold. A good joke will sell quicker than a good poem, and, measured in sweat and blood, will bring better remuneration. Avoid the unhappy ending, the harsh, the brutal, the tragic, the horrible - if you care to see in print things you write. (In this connection don't do as I do, but do as I say.) Humour is the hardest to write, easiest to sell, and best rewarded... Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.

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Jack London 77

American author, journalist, and social activist 1876–1916

John Edensor Littlewood (1885–1977) English Mathematician

"Introduction to A Mathematician's Miscellany", p. 24.
Littlewood's Miscellany (1986)

“Far more important than a good remuneration is the pride of serving one's neighbor.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

On Revolutionary Medicine (1960)

“Thus, then, stands the case. It is good, that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

Speech on the Copyright Bill (5 February 1841)

“A bumper of good liquor
Will end a contest quicker
Than justice, judge, or vicar.”

Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816) Irish-British politician, playwright and writer

Act I, sc. iii.
The Duenna (1775)

“God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.”

Aurelius Augustinus book Enchiridion of Augustine

Enchiridion (c. 420 ), Ch. 27

“The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good. The good is no longer even being measured.”

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) Jewish-American political theorist

On the subject progress. Source: Interview with French writer Roger Errera, 1974. New York Review of Books. As quoted by Scroll Staff (December 04, 2017): Ideas in literature: Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times https://web.archive.org/web/20191001213756/https://scroll.in/article/856549/ten-things-hannah-arendt-said-that-are-eerily-relevant-in-todays-political-times. In: Scroll.in. Archived from the original https://scroll.in/article/856549/ten-things-hannah-arendt-said-that-are-eerily-relevant-in-todays-political-times on October 1, 2019.

“A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad — and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"Answers to Questions," from Mid-Century American Poets, edited by John Ciardi, 1950 [p. 171]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.”

Donald J. Trump book Trump: The Art of the Deal

Source: Trump: The Art of the Deal

“The money pigs of capitalist democracy… Money has made slaves of us… Money is the curse of mankind. It smothers the seed of everything great and good. Every penny is sticky with sweat and blood.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Quoted in The Nazi Party 1919-1945: A Complete History, Dietrich Orlow, New York: NY, Enigma Books, 2012, p 61. Goebbels’ article, “Nationalsozialisten aus Berlin und aus dem Reich”, Voelkischer Beobachter, February 4, 1927
1920s

“We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on "good" rather than on "time"….”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“A good joke will sell quicker than a good poem, and, measured in sweat and blood, will bring better remuneration.”

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