Accounts

"His face had the arrogance, the bruised lips of someone determined to live without money." - James Salter, "Via Negativa" (in Dusk and Other Stories)

"One of his chief difficulties had always been that he could not make himself believe in the importance of making money or spending it. If that were all, then life was not worth the trouble." - Willa Cather, One of Ours

"In the nineteen eighties, people stopped wanting to know how much fun it was. They wanted to know how much money we made, and they were shocked and dismayed to learn that we didn't make any money. We made a living. We paid our bills, paid our artists, and eventually paid off our note. We had a place to live, food to eat, work we liked doing together, and no "spare time." Had I been more candid, I would have confessed that we were totally disinterested in making money. That was what my professors at the University did. They "made money" working in a vicious bureaucracy, so that they could spend it in their "spare time" doing exactly what they liked--which, as far as I could tell, was writing crummy novels about working in a vicious bureaucracy, and summering in Italy. Thus, I have always associated the desire to make money with a profound lack of confidence in one's ability to make a living, to make one's way in the world through wit and wile. So I wanted to make a living, which I succeeded in doing, and I wanted to win, which I rather spectacularly failed to do." - Dave Hickey, "Dealing" (in Air Guitar)