"If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers"
About this Quote
A line like this lands because it pretends to be a practical observation while quietly admitting an older, messier truth: writing is an occupation built on irrational commitment. Cobb, a newspaper man who understood both the marketplace and the ego, frames authorship as a kind of voluntary bad deal. If you were truly “good businessmen,” he suggests, you’d run the numbers and walk away. The joke is that writers do run the numbers; they just keep going anyway.
The intent is less to romanticize poverty than to puncture the respectable myth of the writer as savvy entrepreneur. Cobb is winking at the early-20th-century professionalization of culture, when magazines, syndication, and mass readership turned words into commodities. He knew the contracts, the deadlines, the fickle editors. He also knew that the central engine of writing isn’t fiscal logic but compulsion: vanity, curiosity, obsession, the need to shape experience into sentences even when it doesn’t pay.
“Too much sense” is the dagger. It casts “sense” as something writers must lack, a self-mockery that doubles as a defense. If writing is irrational, then failure isn’t proof of inadequacy; it’s almost a job requirement. That subtext flatters writers while sounding like it scolds them, a neat rhetorical dodge from a journalist who made a career of being both inside the system and slightly above it.
Underneath the cynicism is a sober comment on creative labor: when art has to survive as a business, the people most fit to play the business game may be the least likely to make the work worth buying.
The intent is less to romanticize poverty than to puncture the respectable myth of the writer as savvy entrepreneur. Cobb is winking at the early-20th-century professionalization of culture, when magazines, syndication, and mass readership turned words into commodities. He knew the contracts, the deadlines, the fickle editors. He also knew that the central engine of writing isn’t fiscal logic but compulsion: vanity, curiosity, obsession, the need to shape experience into sentences even when it doesn’t pay.
“Too much sense” is the dagger. It casts “sense” as something writers must lack, a self-mockery that doubles as a defense. If writing is irrational, then failure isn’t proof of inadequacy; it’s almost a job requirement. That subtext flatters writers while sounding like it scolds them, a neat rhetorical dodge from a journalist who made a career of being both inside the system and slightly above it.
Underneath the cynicism is a sober comment on creative labor: when art has to survive as a business, the people most fit to play the business game may be the least likely to make the work worth buying.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Irvin S. Cobb — “If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers.” Listed on Wikiquote (Irvin S. Cobb) as an attributed quotation (no primary work cited). |
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