Wealth & Money Quote by Martin Cruz Smith

Smith’s joke lands because it flips the prestige hierarchy writers are supposed to occupy. Novelists are the sellers of “mere” stories; the serious world, we’re told, belongs to people who deal in facts, numbers, and adult decisions. In two clean sentences he exposes how thoroughly finance runs on narrative anyway - and how willingly we pay for it.

The first line is self-deprecating in the familiar, charming way: I fabricate, you indulge me, money changes hands. Then comes the twist: the novelist, master of plot and character, becomes the mark. Financial planners “tell me stories,” and the cash flows the other way. The gag isn’t just that advisors are persuasive. It’s that their product is confidence packaged as a plotline: a future where the market behaves, retirement arrives on schedule, risk is domesticated by expertise. That’s not a spreadsheet; it’s a genre.

The subtext is mildly cynical and very contemporary: we like to imagine we’re rational consumers, but we buy coherence. Smith is also poking at a specific anxiety of the creative class - irregular income, late-life insecurity, the sense that art doesn’t come with a benefits department. A novelist can conjure whole worlds, yet still has to outsource his own ending.

Context matters here. Smith built a career on intricate thrillers, where institutions lie and narratives compete. He’s applying that same suspicion to money management: the planner’s story may be useful, even necessary, but it’s still a story - and the author isn’t always the one holding the pen.