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Who really said it

I Did It For My Own Pleasure. Then I Did It For My Friends. Now I Do It For Money

Not Ad Reinhardt — actually Ferenc Molnár Ferenc Molnár 1878–1952 · Hungarian playwright and novelist
Disputed In copyright

The drama critic George Jean Nathan printed it in The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), pp. 63–64, recalling a morning “two Summers ago” in a coffee-house garden in the Austrian Tyrol where Molnár, asked how he regarded his writing, answered “Like a whore.” Ad Reinhardt did use a version of the line — in a 1960 paper on artists’ ethics — but he set it in quotation marks and credited no one, and twenty-eight years separate his 1960 paper from Nathan’s 1932 printing.

Last verified 25 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“I Did It For My Own Pleasure. Then I Did It For My Friends. Now I Do It For Money” — Ferenc Molnár, on his own playwriting, recorded by George Jean Nathan in The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (1932) as "First, I did it for my own pleasure. Then I did it for the pleasure of my friends. And now—I do it for money." Often credited to Ad Reinhardt, who quoted it in 1960; sometimes to Molière or Virginia Woolf, who did not say it. Traced by quotle.info · Verbatim: “Like a whore. First, I did it for my own pleasure. Then I did it for the pleasure of my friends. And now—I do it for money.”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Ad Reinhardt. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The estate of George Jean Nathan and Alfred A. Knopf (the 1932 volume); University of California Press (the 1991 Reinhardt collection)). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Ferenc Molnár — Hungarian playwright, novelist and journalist. Theme: "I Did It For My Own Pleasure. Then I Did It For My Friends. Now I Do It For Money". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "I Did It For My Own Pleasure. Then I Did It For My Friends. Now I Do It For Money". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Earliest documented form
1932, recalling a conversation “two Summers ago” (so about 1930)
Printed in
The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), pp. 63–64
Spoken by
Ferenc Molnár, to Nathan and Dr. Rudolf Kommer, in the Austrian Tyrol
Reinhardt’s version
Rule 11 of “The Artist in Search of a Code of Ethics”, read in New York in 1960 — in quotation marks, unattributed

Like a whore. First, I did it for my own pleasure. Then I did it for the pleasure of my friends. And now—I do it for money.

That is the 1932 wording as Nathan set it down, quoted by Quote Investigator ↗ and reproduced independently on Wikiquote’s Virginia Woolf page ↗, which files the modern “writing is like sex” form under Misattributed and points back to the same book. Reinhardt’s 1960 version runs “first you do it for love, then you do it for others, and finally you do it for money” — already a quotation when he used it.

The 1932 book
The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan at the Internet Archive
Quote Investigator: "First I Did It For My Own Pleasure"

How we verified this

  • Quote Investigator ↗ concludes the quip “was probably first constructed by Ferenc Molnár around 1930 and reported by George Jean Nathan in 1932”, and cites The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (Knopf, 1932), pp. 63–64, noting it verified the page on paper.
  • Wikiquote ↗ reaches the same place by a different route: the “Writing is like sex” version sits in its Misattributed section for Woolf, and the note there transcribes the 1932 Nathan passage word for word.
  • Reinhardt’s own text is the reason his name stuck. QI quotes Rule 11 of his “Thirteen Rules of Ethical Conduct for Professional Fine Artists” — “It is not right for artists to think that painting is like prostitution, that ‘first you do it for love, then you do it for others, and finally you do it for money’” — from Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt ↗ (ed. Barbara Rose, University of California Press, 1991), p. 163. The inner quotation marks are his.
  • The Internet Archive’s catalogue confirms both books as QI describes them: the Nathan volume ↗ as New York: A. A. Knopf, 1932, and the Reinhardt collection ↗ as Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
In copyright

The earliest documented wording appears in a book published in 1932 — after the 1930 line beyond which US works are not automatically in the public domain — so we assert no public-domain status. We have not traced whether that copyright was renewed, and we prefer to understate the freedom of a text rather than overstate it. Reinhardt’s 1960 phrasing reaches us through a 1991 University of California Press collection and is plainly still in copyright. This is not legal advice.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Often misattributed

Four names get this line, and the evidence separates them cleanly: one said it first, two borrowed it openly, and two never said it at all.

Ad Reinhardt Quoter, not author

Reinhardt used the saying in 1960 in Rule 11 of “The Artist in Search of a Code of Ethics” — but he wrapped it in quotation marks and named no source, which is how a man signals he is repeating something. QI ↗ notes that “in later years the words were sometimes attributed directly to him.”

Molière A misheard name

The earliest Molière attribution QI ↗ can find is 1958, in a Nat Hentoff column quoting the novelist Ed Lacy. QI suggests Lacy may have misheard the less familiar name Molnár as Molière; no French or English source older than Molnár’s has been produced.

Virginia Woolf Recent and unsourced

The “writing is like sex” wording circulates under Woolf’s name online. Wikiquote files it under Misattributed ↗, and QI calls the connection “rather recent” — possibly seeded by Woolf’s own, quite different, letters comparing publication to selling herself.

Philippe Halsman Early user

The Life photographer told a version in 1961 — “I drifted into photography like one drifts into prostitution” — and Leonard Nimoy recorded him telling it again as a story about someone else. Like Reinhardt, a user rather than an author.

The line is Ferenc Molnár’s, about his own playwriting, recorded by George Jean Nathan in 1932; Reinhardt quoted it in 1960 and the quotation marks around it are his own — see Quote Investigator ↗.

Context

Why it mattered

Molnár was at the height of his European fame when he said it, and the joke works because he is the one telling it about himself: the man who wrote Liliom reducing his own career to a shrug and a monocle. Nathan, who collected exactly this kind of remark, printed it two years later.

What happened afterwards is the interesting part. The saying is portable — swap writing for painting, or photography, or sex — so each profession adopted it and each adopter picked up the credit. Reinhardt got it because he was quoting it in print in 1960; Woolf got it because the internet needed a woman writer to have said something bracing about money.

Reinhardt put the words in quotation marks. Everyone who quoted him afterwards took the marks off.

Read the full story

The chain QI assembles runs: Molnár to Nathan about 1930, printed 1932; Lynton Hudson’s Life and the Theatre in 1949, with “cocotte” for “whore”; Ed Lacy’s epigraph credited to Molière, quoted in the Village Voice in 1958; Reinhardt’s Rule 11 in 1960; Halsman in 1961; Weidman crediting Molnár again in 1962.

Reinhardt’s paper was read at the College Art Association meeting in New York on 28 January 1960 and, with further changes, at the Artists’ Club that April — a detail recorded in the editorial note to the essay in Art-as-Art. The rule it belongs to is a joke in its own right: the offending artist is to be “registered as a ‘lumpen artist’, issued an identity card, and dismissed with a suspended sentence.”

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Creativity Work

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator — this sayingquoteinvestigator.com

The investigation this page defers to: the 1932 Nathan citation, the Molière and Woolf attributions weighed and rejected, and Reinhardt and Halsman placed as later users.
Wikiquote — Virginia Woolf (Misattributed)en.wikiquote.org

Lists the "Writing is like sex" version as misattributed to Woolf and transcribes the 1932 Nathan passage in full — an independent corroboration of the earliest source.
Internet Archive — The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (1932)archive.org

The book that carries the earliest documented wording. Catalogued as New York: A. A. Knopf, 1932.
Internet Archive — Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardtarchive.org

The 1991 University of California Press collection whose page 163 carries Reinhardt’s 1960 Rule 11, the source of the credit to him.
Wikipedia — Ferenc Molnáren.wikipedia.org

Biography of the playwright the earliest evidence credits (1878–1952), author of Liliom and The Paul Street Boys.
Wikipedia — Ad Reinhardten.wikipedia.org

Biography of the painter the line is popularly credited to (1913–1967).

The author

About Ferenc Molnár

Ferenc Molnár

1878–1952 · Hungarian playwright, novelist and journalist

Ferenc Molnár (born Ferenc Neumann in Budapest, 12 January 1878 – 1 April 1952) wrote Liliom, the play Rodgers and Hammerstein turned into Carousel, and the boys’ novel The Paul Street Boys, translated into dozens of languages. He was a working newspaperman before he was a dramatist, and the mordant, self-mocking register of this line — delivered with a monocle and a shrug — is exactly the pose his contemporaries recorded. He left Europe for the United States in 1940 and died in New York.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The earliest documented source (Chicago)

Nathan, George Jean. The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932, 63–64. The earliest documented appearance, per Quote Investigator, recording Ferenc Molnár in the Austrian Tyrol about 1930. Reinhardt’s later version is in Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 163.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I Did It For My Own Pleasure. Then I Did It For My Friends. Now I Do It For Money’?” Last verified 25 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-did-it-for-my-own-pleasure-then-i-did-it-for-my-friends/

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