Art & Creativity Quote by Louis Kronenberger

A neat little paradox with a sharpened blade: Kronenberger frames gossip not as a guilty pleasure but as an occupation built on trespass. The sentence works because it pretends to be a job description while smuggling in an indictment. “Business” does double duty, meaning both livelihood and rightful concern; the line implies gossip becomes respectable the moment it’s monetized, even when its raw material is other people’s privacy.

Kronenberger, a critic steeped in theater, literature, and the social rituals around celebrity, understood that modern fame is a public performance with a private backstage everyone feels entitled to storm. His phrasing suggests a cultural bargain: the columnist sells intimacy, the audience buys it, and the subject pays in dignity. The columnist isn’t portrayed as uniquely vile, just professionally consistent. That’s the sting. Blame doesn’t land on one snoop; it lands on a system that turns “none of his business” into a market category.

The subtext is about moral outsourcing. Readers get to consume rumor while pretending the dirt arrived by accident, delivered by a designated sinner in print. Kronenberger’s wit cuts through the self-seriousness of media institutions: gossip thrives precisely because it violates decorum, then laundered into “news” by repetition and column inches.

In the mid-20th century, when newspaper columns and radio chatter were consolidating celebrity culture, he’s warning that the boundary between public interest and public appetite isn’t eroding naturally. It’s being eroded for profit, with a grin and a byline.