“It has long been speculated that money predates writing because the earliest examples of writing appear to be records of monetary debts—meaning that the closely intertwined chronology of the development of writing and money will make it impossible to find a written history.”

— L. Randall Wray

L. Randall Wray, The Credit Money, State Money, and Endogenous Money Approaches: A Survey and Attempted Integration. (2005)

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L. Randall Wray 4

American economist 1953

Eric Roll, Baron Roll of Ipsden (1907–2005) British economist

Source: A History of Economic Thought (1939), Chapter I, The Beginnings, p. 53

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

Molière (1622–1673) French playwright and actor

“There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 4; a record of a remark by Orwell's fellow tramp Boris

“Over short periods, the relation between growth in money and growth in nominal income is often hard to see, partly because the relation is less close for short than for long periods, but mostly because it takes time for changes in monetary growth to affect income. And how long a time is itself variable. Today's income growth is not closely related to today's monetary growth; it depends on what has been happening to money in the past. What happens to money today affects what is going to happen to income in the future”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Source: Money Mischief (1992), Ch. 2 The Mystery of Money

“Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.”

William Zinsser (1922–2015) writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, professor

Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 6, Words, p. 36.

“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.