Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Curtis

The line lands like a polite correction with a quiet flex underneath it. Curtis isn’t just offering a biographical footnote; he’s repositioning himself inside an industry that still loves tidy categories. “You have to remember” reads as preemptive damage control, the phrase you use when an audience is slipping into the wrong mental model of who you are. It carries the faint irritation of being misunderstood and the sharper intention of setting terms.

The subtext is strategic: don’t evaluate my decisions as if I’m only an agent. A literary agency is supposed to be an intermediary, a broker of deals and relationships. An ebook publisher is a player with skin in the outcome, potentially even a competitor to the very publishers an agent negotiates with. Curtis is signaling dual leverage and dual incentives, a reality check for authors, traditional houses, and anyone concerned with conflicts of interest. The “in addition to” is doing a lot of work, suggesting this second identity isn’t a hobby; it’s a parallel engine.

Contextually, it’s a sentence born of digital disruption and a shifting power map. Ebooks made it newly plausible for agents (and writers) to bypass legacy gates, build direct revenue streams, and treat rights not as a one-time sale but as a portfolio. Curtis frames that shift as a matter of remembering, but the real message is harder: the middleman is evolving into a maker, and the old assumptions about who controls access, pricing, and readership no longer hold.