Life & Wisdom Quote by Georges Simenon

Simenon’s line lands like a cold diagnostic, not a romantic lament. By refusing the word “profession,” he strips writing of its modern alibis: career ladders, networking, a tidy identity you can invoice. “Vocation” drags the work back into older territory, closer to calling and compulsion than to craft. And then he poisons even that noble framing with “unhappiness,” as if to say the call isn’t holy, it’s hostile.

The intent is partly self-defense. Simenon, famously prolific, understood how easily productivity gets mistaken for ease. This sentence preempts the outsider’s fantasy that a successful writer must be a satisfied one. It also warns the aspiring: if you need external reassurance, don’t pick the one art that asks you to manufacture your own meaning in private, day after day, while questioning whether any of it matters.

The subtext is about the psychological economy of writing. To write well, you cultivate a kind of dissatisfaction: with the world as it is, with your first draft, with your own motives. Happiness tends to be blunt; it fills the room. Unhappiness has edges and shadows, the stuff plot and character are made from. Simenon’s mystery novels and psychological portraits don’t emerge from serenity; they’re powered by the itch that something is off, that people are not what they claim, that comfort is suspicious.

Context matters too. Simenon wrote through war, displacement, and Europe’s moral hangover, producing books at an industrial pace while excavating bleak inner lives. The line is less a complaint than a credo: writing isn’t what you do after you’re okay; it’s what you do because you’re not.