Wealth & Money Quote by Bernard Cornwell

Cornwell’s line is a bracing refusal of the modern writer’s worst temptation: to confuse the work with the hustle. He draws a clean border between the agent’s incentive structure and the novelist’s, and the bluntness is the point. Agents “might make money” if a manuscript hits; that speculative bet is literally their profession. The writer’s job, Cornwell insists, is not to audition for gatekeepers but to build a book worth betting on.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to a culture that nudges writers into perpetual pitching: polishing query letters, gaming trends, chasing the phantom of what “the market wants.” Cornwell flips the power dynamic. Instead of begging for attention, he treats attention as something earned by the manuscript itself. It’s also a small act of psychological self-defense. If you take on the agent’s anxiety - will this sell, will they bite, will it be “high concept” enough - you import a second job that corrodes the first. His sentence quarantines that corrosive logic.

Context matters here: Cornwell is a prolific, commercially successful novelist who came up in a publishing world where agents were filters and accelerants, not co-authors of your strategy. He’s not naive about money; he’s reminding you that money is downstream. The intent isn’t anti-agent. It’s anti-distraction. Write like your responsibility ends at the page, because it does. Agents can monetize possibility; authors have to manufacture it.