Wealth & Money Quote by Don Marquis

Marquis lands the jab with the gentleness of a parlor insult and the precision of a newsroom veteran. The line is a two-part trap: it pretends to offer practical career advice, then quietly defines “commercial success” as capitulation to the lowest common denominator. The detail about readers moving their lips is doing the heavy lifting. It’s not just “uneducated” as a status marker; it’s a physical tell, a tiny piece of behavioral anthropology that makes the target vivid, almost audible. You can see the mouth working, the private struggle to decode. That concreteness is what turns a complaint about mass taste into comedy with teeth.

The intent is less snobbery for its own sake than a warning about the market’s gravitational pull. Marquis, a journalist who wrote during the boom of mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, knew exactly how editors chase “readability,” how clarity can slide into simplification, and how simplification can become a business model. The subtext: if your goal is money, don’t write to challenge or deepen anyone; write to reduce friction, to keep pages turning for readers who treat text like an obstacle course.

There’s cynicism here, but also professional self-awareness. Marquis isn’t claiming difficulty equals virtue; he’s pointing out that the reward system often favors the work that demands the least. It’s a bleakly funny reminder that “popular” can be a category of commerce before it’s a category of culture, and that writers negotiate that compromise every time they decide how much intelligence they’re willing to assume.