Art & Creativity Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Colton turns authorship into a three-act obstacle course, and the joke lands because it refuses the comforting myth that good writing naturally rises. The first difficulty is craft: producing something "worth publishing" suggests a moral bar as much as an aesthetic one, a nod to the grind and self-doubt behind any finished work. Then he swerves from the solitary labor of writing to the social machinery that decides what counts. "Honest men to publish it" is a jab at gatekeepers who can be bought, swayed, or simply timid. In Colton's era, publishing was a tight ecosystem of patrons, printers, and periodicals, with libel laws, political loyalties, and reputational risk shaping what got ink. Honesty here is less virtue-signaling than a practical requirement: without integrity, the marketplace edits your work before readers ever see it.

The final clause is the bleakest punchline. After talent and integrity, the author still has to locate "sensible men to read it" - a sly insult to the public and an admission of how attention works. Sensible readers are rare not because people are stupid, but because mass taste is pulled by fashion, faction, and distraction. Colton's subtext is that authorship is never just art; it's negotiation with incentives at every step. The wit is sharpened by its implied pessimism: the hardest part of being right is finding a system willing to reward it.