Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard H. Davis

Self-deprecation masquerading as arithmetic: Davis turns a negotiation into a little moral fable about appetite and self-respect. The line works because it performs indifference while quietly measuring power. “The more I thought of the McClure offer the less I thought of it” is a neat rhetorical loop, a shrug sharpened into a sentence. He’s not merely declining; he’s making the offer look smaller by the act of reconsidering it. Thought becomes a solvent that dissolves someone else’s valuation.

The subtext is classic late-19th-century literary labor politics, when “McClure” likely signals S.S. McClure’s magazine empire and the emerging marketplace that treated writers as both craftsmen and brand assets. Davis, a working journalist and fiction writer with a public profile, is asserting that his worth can’t be compressed into a flat fee. “Satisfied where I was” reads like contentment, but it’s also leverage: I have options, I’m not desperate, you can’t buy me with pocket money.

Then comes the dagger: “the $75 he offered me was no inducement.” It’s a refusal framed as a verdict on their seriousness. Davis isn’t romanticizing art over money; he’s being cold-eyed about what money signals. A low number doesn’t just underpay, it under-recognizes. In a culture where magazines were professionalizing writing and monetizing prestige, this sentence is Davis drawing a bright line: if you want my work, you pay for the authority that comes with it, not just the words on the page.