Life & Wisdom Quote by Jeffery Deaver

Deaver’s line lands like a dry aside, the kind that punctures the romantic myth of the Poet as both starving artist and irresistible heartthrob. He’s not attacking poetry so much as the cultural economy around it: what we reward, what we ignore, and how quickly “art” becomes a punchline when rent is due.

The first clause is a blunt account of market reality dressed as common sense. “One does not make a living” isn’t just financial advice; it’s a quiet critique of a society that treats certain forms of beauty as leisure products. The professor exception is doing double duty. It acknowledges the institutional pipeline that keeps poetry afloat (grants, workshops, tenure committees) while also implying a kind of captivity: poetry can survive, but often only after it’s been domesticated by academia and turned into a credential.

Then Deaver swerves into sex and status, because that’s where the fantasy of the poet traditionally cashes out. “Doesn’t get a lot of girls” is intentionally coarse, a little dated, and strategically so: it frames “poet” as low social capital in a world that equates desirability with visible success. The joke is that we still pretend to worship art, but we don’t want to date it, fund it, or bet our futures on it.

Coming from a bestselling crime novelist, the subtext is also self-aware positioning: Deaver is implicitly defending popular storytelling as the form that actually pays, reaches people, and confers cultural power. Poetry becomes the foil that lets him say, with a wink, that idealism is expensive.