Wealth & Money Quote by Robert Asprin

The first move is disarming: "We're kidding on that". Asprin opens with a wink, the kind of casual correction that signals he knows how quickly creative partnerships slide into rumor, ego, or fan-fueled mythology. It reads like someone swatting away the sensational version of events before it hardens into canon. The humor isn’t decorative; it’s a pressure-release valve that lets him pivot to the real point without sounding defensive.

Then the sentence turns into a contract, spoken aloud. "One of the things I insisted upon" foregrounds agency and boundaries: this wasn’t a handshake drift into collaboration, it was negotiated. Asprin isn’t selling starry-eyed artistic communion; he’s staking out governance. The phrase "full partners" is doing heavy lifting, insisting on parity not just in credit but in power. He immediately clarifies what parity actually means, because "partner" is one of those flattering words that can hide lopsided reality.

"Going fifty-fifty" lands with the bluntness of accounting, and the doubling - "both on the money and on the say" - is the real thesis. Creative projects often split revenue while centralizing control, or share decision-making while leaving someone underpaid. Asprin refuses both traps. The kicker is "what's going on with the books": not just authorship, but the entire lifecycle - direction, decisions, maybe even branding and series continuity. The subtext is protection: of fairness, of friendship, of a franchise’s integrity. In the publishing world, that’s not cynicism; it’s survival dressed as plain talk.