Daily Inspiration Quote by Aaron Allston

A cool little grenade of a sentence: it pretends to be about money, but it’s really about permission. “No one pays me to be nice” frames kindness as a job requirement some people perform on contract (service workers, public-facing roles, anyone forced to manage other people’s emotions for a paycheck). By contrast, the speaker claims the freedom to be blunt, prickly, even cruel, because there’s no wage tethering them to politeness.

That’s the subtextual flex: niceness isn’t presented as virtue, it’s presented as labor. The line needles the way “being nice” often functions as social currency or professional expectation, especially in spaces where power flows one way and civility is demanded from the less powerful. Allston flips it. If niceness is a purchased commodity, then refusing to supply it becomes a kind of independence.

Coming from a novelist known for genre work with sharp dialogue and humor, the intent likely isn’t nihilism so much as a character tell (or an authorial shrug): this is someone who sees through etiquette and treats it as transactional. The economy metaphor also smuggles in a self-justification. If nobody’s paying, then any rudeness can be filed under “not my job,” a neat moral loophole that lets the speaker dodge accountability while sounding delightfully honest.

It works because it’s compact and modern: a one-liner that captures a whole cultural suspicion that “niceness” is often performance, not principle, and that bluntness can be mistaken for authenticity.