Art & Creativity Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Colton doesn not romanticize the writer as a solitary genius; he frames authorship as a three-part obstacle course where craft is only the opening gate. The line is built like a neat syllogism - write, publish, read - but its bite comes from the adjectives he smuggles in: worth, honest, sensible. Each one implies its opposite is the default condition. Most writing is noise. Most publishing is compromised. Most reading is unserious. In a single sentence, he turns the literary marketplace into a moral ecosystem with predators at every level.

The subtext is less self-pity than a cool-eyed theory of cultural circulation. "Worth publishing" is not just good prose; it's work sturdy enough to survive fashion, censorship, and the author’s own vanity. "Honest people to publish it" points to gatekeepers - editors, printers, patrons - who can be bribed by ideology, money, or the desire to avoid trouble. Colton wrote in an era when pamphlets, periodicals, and sermons competed for attention, and when the pressures of libel laws and patronage still shaped what could safely appear in print. He knew that publication was never a neutral conveyor belt.

The final clause is the sharpest: the reader is not cast as victim but as liability. "Sensible people" suggests an audience capable of discrimination, patience, and skepticism - the exact traits mass culture tends to punish. The sentence lands because it refuses the comforting myth that merit naturally rises; it argues that literature is a relay race, and genius can still lose if the handoffs are rigged.