February 14, 2024
Also on the rue Laffitte was the confectioner Fouquet where one could console oneself with delicious honey cakes and nut candies and once in a while instead of a picture buy oneself strawberry jam in a glass bowl.
—Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.
—Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
It was in New York that I learned that I could actually have the life I’d always dreamed of having—a writer’s life—even as I learned that what that meant, in practical terms, was something far less romantic and far more precarious than I had imagined. Notice, however, that I don’t say “than I might have hoped,” because the trade-off has always seemed to me like a fair one. Other people have more money, more consistency, more security, more of whatever else people have. Me? I pretty much do what I want all day. I read what I want to read and I think about what I want to think about and I make up whatever I feel like making up, and only after the fact do I stop to wonder whether the world will evince any interest in what I’ve made. It’s a kind of freedom that few people ever know, and fewer still are able to maintain as they get older. (My parents, certainly, never knew anything like it; I’m sure most parents don’t.) So it didn’t surprise or offend me that such great privilege came at a price, namely, financial security and material comfort.
—Justin Taylor, Riding with the Ghost
freedom, yeh, these holes in my shoes
my kids shoes
no don’t worry
you see they’re special they’ll never wear out as I boot your face in over and over
—Sean Bonney, from an untitled poem in Our Death (53)
The real agent of decay in our lives was always, and unmistakably, money. It did the one thing it knew how to do—it ran out—and with it, gradually, went our ability to stand being around one another.
—Jonathan Dee, “Preexisting Condition”
His wife had been through with him before but it never lasted. He was very wealthy, and would be much wealthier, and he knew she would not leave him ever now. That was one of the few things that he really knew. He knew about that, about motor cycles—that was earliest—about motor cars, about duck-shooting, about fishing, trout, salmon and big-sea, about sex in books, many books, too many books, about all court games, about dogs, not so much about horses, about hanging on to his money, about most of the other things his world dealt in, and about his wife not leaving him.
—Ernest Hemingway, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”
Deeming that I earn too little, a friend of mine who’s a partner in a successful firm that does a lot of business with the government said the other day: “You’re being exploited, Soares.” And I remembered that indeed I am. But since in life we must all be exploited, I wonder if it’s any worse being exploited by Vasques and his fabrics than by vanity, by glory, by resentment, by envy or by the impossible.
—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (translated by Richard Zenith)
. . . I have never had to depend on my books for a livelihood. Until I retired from teaching not long ago, I had a perfectly adequate academic salary to depend on. I could have been panned by every critic on earth, my book sales could have plummeted to zero, and I would not have starved. The uglier side of Grub Street—the animosities, the fawning and backbiting, and so forth—comes from a sometimes desperate need to scrounge a living.
—J. M. Coetzee, in a letter to Paul Auster
Writing’s natural place is as a passionate side hustle.
—Lorrie Moore, in an interview
I calculated that I could use the academy to support me while I surreptitiously followed a writing career. But, as is so often the case, I miscalculated. First I became an academic who did a little writing on the side; later I turned into a writer marked deeply (too deeply?) by involvement with the academy. I would have been better off being just (just!) a writer. But in order to be just a writer, I would have had to be someone other than myself.
—Coetzee, from notes for Diary of a Bad Year (quoted in David Atwell’s J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing)