Life & Wisdom Quote by Brian Lumley

Lumley’s line is a small act of repositioning: it drags the writer down from the pulpit and back onto the stage. “Entertainment business” is deliberately unromantic phrasing, closer to a marquee than a seminar room. It’s a quiet rebuke to the idea that serious writing must wear suffering like credentials, or that genre work needs to apologize for wanting to be read greedily, late at night, with the lights on.

The subtext is both practical and defiant. Practical, because it frames writing as a transaction with an audience: attention is earned, not granted. Defiant, because it refuses the snobbery that treats pleasure as suspect. Lumley, best known for horror and pulpy mythologies, signals allegiance to momentum, suspense, payoff - the craft of keeping readers turning pages. In that sense, “business” isn’t crass; it’s honest. It names the ecosystem: publishing, sales, fan expectation, series structure, the long conversation between storyteller and reader.

Then he adds the personal kicker: “it gives me lots of pleasure.” That turns commerce into intimacy. Entertainment isn’t presented as pandering but as reciprocity: the writer enjoys the reader’s enjoyment. It’s also a subtle craft manifesto. If your goal is to entertain, clarity matters, pace matters, and the bar is immediate: boredom is failure. Lumley’s intent isn’t to lower literature’s ambitions; it’s to remind it that delight is an ambition, too - and a demanding one.