Wealth & Money Quote by Jonathan Kellerman

The most revealing move here is the self-interruption: a question that answers itself, then keeps talking anyway. Kellerman frames writing as something that needs a moral alibi. Money is acknowledged as a legitimate motive - he even grants it prestige, nodding to "very good writers" - but he quickly quarantines that possibility from his own practice. It's a careful bit of professional boundary-setting: he's not condemning commerce, he's protecting desire.

Coming from a psychologist-turned-novelist, the subtext is almost clinical. Motivation matters because motivation leaks into the work. If the principal reason is cash, the writing starts optimizing for external reward: trends, deadlines, audience expectation. If the principal reason is wanting to write, the work gets to be internally coherent, driven by curiosity, compulsion, and the private satisfactions that keep a person returning to the page when no one is watching. The repetition of "principal" reads like a diagnostic criterion - the primary cause that organizes all the others.

There's also a quiet anxiety in "has to remain". As if the market, success, or sheer productivity could erode the original impulse. Kellerman is speaking from inside a culture that treats authorship as content production and creativity as a monetizable brand. The line isn't romantic; it's defensive. He isn't claiming purity. He's describing a maintenance task: preserving the core appetite so the profession doesn't hollow out the practice.