Definitely a sterling example of the benefits of not paying people, given that he died in poverty and spent his life working odd jobs despite writing what was a best seller in debtor's prison.

But as you found quotes from someone arguing that writing to be paid is somehow bad

"I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money'" -- Maya Angelou

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money" -- Samuel Johnson.

But hey, I gotta admit, the first guy had one example of someone who wrote despite not having hopes of getting anything for their effort and now you come with one, so obviously my idea that not everyone has in the age of the world written without hope of compensation was wrong.

But let's go back to your quote, which for some reason you think is a good one against my assertion that there are people have written for money and to retain copyright.

Sancho makes the final point "It will be a wonder if he succeeds, for it will be only hurry, hurry, with him, like the tailor on Easter Eve; and works done in a hurry are never finished as perfectly as they ought to be."

Which is a really good point for someone writing in a time when copyright did not exist and the only way to ever make money from your writing was to write quickly and to get the work into someone's hands after which they paid you, maybe, once.

I'm of course in agreement, somewhat, that works done too quickly are not done well enough, but some people can write at a speed that to others may seem in a hurry but to them are rather slow.

But I will give an example, Mark Twain, who I've already pointed out is the perfect example of someone who definitely wrote for money, except for a couple things he wrote towards the end of his life when he was old and bitter and also pretty darn rich by the standards of his time.

He took 7 years to write Huck Finn. If he wrote for money how did he afford this? Well he shelved it for a bit when he had writer's block and wrote other things for money, but also because he was in a much more financially secure situation than Cervantes expected the writer for money to be, due to his success, part of that success based on copyrighting Tom Sawyer before its publication.

But he also did do a bunch of crap, including the sequels to Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and of course writing The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson too quickly to keep from bankruptcy from bad investments. I am not against the assertion that writing for money will produce things that are bad, but I do not believe that, quotes aside, it can be shown definitely that it will produce bad things.

At any rate if you read things written the last few hundred years and find them worthwhile, unless you are very particular in how you choose what you read, you probably have read lots of things that were written either partially or wholly for money.

Finally I notice neither you or other people who responded had anything to say to this part of what I wrote

"And of those who write even without monetary recompense, will they publish?

Will they send off to someone their writing and then sit through the editorial process for months, and agree to changes in order to get published?

Will they go through all the various parts of having to sell since they will not be getting paid for what they wrote?"

I look forward to the quotes from great works of literature detailing how the non-writing parts of the publishing process are required for the writer to produce something great and how they should not consider money when laboring on that either.

This attitude reminds me a lot of Stallman, and honestly, I fundamentally disagree with his absolutism about the ethics of being paid to write closed-source software.

Sure, there are many people who are happy to write software in their spare time, and are sufficiently well off from another income stream that they can afford to not profit from the software they produce (although I suspect that the vast majority of open-source programmers also derive their primary income from closed-source software).

But a simple fact of life is that people need to eat, find shelter, etc, and it's reasonable to expect that if you have a particular skill that others don't that you should be able to exchange the products of that skill for money from the people who recognise that skill and want the products of it (whether it be software, books, artworks, music, whatever).

Sure, there are some people who would continue producing the art/writings/music anyway in their free time because that's what motivates them in life. But what a shame it is when someone can only do that for a few hours per week because they need to work a full time job which doesn't utilise their talent just to put food on the table. Perhaps they'll choose to live a meagre life, and work for the "sake of subject" and die in poverty, but most won't. That doesn't reflect on the quality of the work, just how much hardship the creator is prepared to endure.

I'd never heard of Arthur Schopenhauer before, but reading his Wikipedia suggests that he came from a wealthy family and he never had to worry about money. Perhaps his argument just boils down to class at the end of the day, and that only authors from a well off background should be given a voice. But like I say, I don't know anything about him and he sounds like a well regarded philosopher, so I'm probably well off base.

I made a response on the Cervantes quote

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002363

that pertains here to some extent.

Don’t mix Kings and Rowlings, he’s at a whole other level