“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.”

— Molière

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Molière 72

French playwright and actor 1622–1673

Related quotes

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

The Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/tag/virginia-woolf/ traces the origin of such statements to The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (1932), where the diarist states:
We were sitting one morning two Summers ago, Ferenc Molnár, Dr. Rudolf Kommer and I, in the little garden of a coffee-house in the Austrian Tyrol. “Your writing?” we asked him. “How do you regard it?” Languidly he readjusted the inevitable monocle to his eye. “Like a whore,” he blandly ventured. “First, I did it for my own pleasure. Then I did it for the pleasure of my friends. And now — I do it for money.”
Misattributed

“I was thinking, earlier, how there's this stigma attached to "writing for money" and how odd that is, as though writing is akin to sex (another "creative" act?) and writing for money is akin to prostitution in the minds of so many people.”

Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964) writer

(29 November 2001)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2001
Context: I was thinking, earlier, how there's this stigma attached to "writing for money" and how odd that is, as though writing is akin to sex (another "creative" act?) and writing for money is akin to prostitution in the minds of so many people. Whoring with adjectives, so to speak. Do I give good prose? Look up the definition of "hack." So, there must be the perception that writing, like the priesthood, comes with some higher purpose in tow. Getting paid well somehow sullies the purer cause. I've heard writers dismiss something or another that they've written by explaining, "Oh, yes, I know that sucked, but I only wrote it because they paid me so much money." And then we might even forgive them a piece of crap, because we have a sensible explanation. That wasn't a real orgasm. I was only faking the plot. Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner in Hollywood.