The literary greats have plenty to say on life, death, love and adventure, but what about the stuff that makes the world go round? That's right: gravity and the motion of the planets.
Oh no, hang on, we mean money. The dirty dollar. The greenbacks.
Well, as you can imagine, being authors, they often write a lot of philosophical stuff which probably won't instantly improve your bottom line, but there's a lot of sound advice in there nonetheless. Be inspired, improve your business acumen, and read on...
- These are the best office chairs for budding novelists (and everyone else)
- The best budget office chairs are great chairs you can get on the cheap.
The Winter of Our Discontent
Author: John Steinbeck
Year: 1961
“In business and in politics a man must carve and maul his way through men to get to be King of the Mountain. Once there, he can be great and kind-but he must get there first.”
Master of the Game
Author: Sidney Sheldon
Year: 1982
“Business is a game, played for fantastic stakes, and you're in competition with experts. If you want to win, you have to learn to be a master of the game.”
Wuthering Heights
Author: Emily Brontë
Year: 1847
“A person who has not done one half his day's work by ten o'clock, runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.”
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Author: L. Frank Baum
Year: 1900
Emma
Author: Jane Austen
Year: 1815
“Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does.”
Goldfinger
Author: Ian Fleming
Year: 1959
“Unfortunately most ways of making big money take a long time. By the time one has made the money one is too old to enjoy it.”
A Christmas Carol
Author: Charles Dickens
Year: 1843
Scrooge: "It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's. Mine occupies me constantly.”
Sacred Hunger
Author: Barry Unsworth
Year: 1992
“It is everyone's bounden duty to try to get more than they have got already. If you have got two shillin' you try to make it into four shillin' . . . there is no end to it.”
The Salmon of Doubt
Author: Douglas Adams
Year: 2002
“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
The Shadow of the Wind
Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Year: 2001
“Making money isn't hard in itself...what's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.”
Equal Rites
Author: Terry Pratchett
Year: 1987
“...it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done.”
The Importance of Being Earnest
Author: Oscar Wilde
Year: 1895
"It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then merely at dinner parties.”
Les Misérables
Author: Victor Hugo
Year: 1862
“A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.”
Heart of Darkness
Artist: Joseph Conrad
Year: 1899
“I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”
The Three Muskateers
Author: Alexandre Dumas
Year: 1844
“The merit of all things lies in their difficulty.”
The Pilgramage
Author: Paulo Coelho
Year: 1987
“The busiest people I have known in my life always have time enough to do everything. Those who do nothing are always tired and pay no attention to the little amount of work they are required to do. They complain constantly that the day is too short.
Anna Karenina
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Year: 1877
“But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.”
Little Women
Author: Louisa May Alcott
Year: 1868
“Go on with your work as usual, for work is a blessed solace.”
David Copperfield
Author: Charles Dickens
Year: 1850
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.”
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
Year: 1927
“Anything is better than stagnation.”
No Country for Old Men
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Year: 2005
“Well, I guess in all honesty I would have to say that I never knew, nor did I ever hear of anybody, that money didn't change.”
Billy Budd
Author: Herman Melville
Year: 1924
"There is nothing namable but that some men will undertake to do it for pay."
Pygmalion
Author: George Bernard Shaw
Year: 1912
"Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby!"
Pet Sematary
Author: Stephen King
Year: 1983
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
Robinson Crusoe
Author: Daniel Defoe
Year: 1719
"Now I saw, though too late, the folly of beginning a work before we count the cost, and before we judge rightly of our own strength to go through with it."
Mansfield Park
Author: Jane Austen
Year: 1814
"There is nothing like employment, active indispensable employment, for relieving sorrow."
Dracula
Author: Bram Stoker
Year: 1897
"We learn from failure, not from success!"
Wreck of the Golden Mary
Author: Charles Dickens
Year: 1856
"I admire machinery as much is any man, and am as thankful to it as any man can be for what it does for us. But it will never be a substitute for the face of a man, with his soul in it, encouraging another man to be brave and true."
The Alchemist
Author: Paolo Coehlo
Year: 1988
“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
Winnie-the-Pooh
Author: A. A. Milne
Year: 1926
“You can't stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.”
