Quote Investigator traces the quip to the Hungarian dramatist Ferenc Molnár. George Jean Nathan quotes him in The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (Knopf, 1932) comparing his writing to a whore: done first for his own pleasure, then for his friends’, “and now—I do it for money.” QI calls the Woolf attribution “rather recent” and finds no source for the “Writing is like sex” wording in her work.
“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money” Ferenc Molnár, as quoted in The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (Knopf, 1932), pp. 63–64. Often misattributed to Virginia Woolf as “Writing is like sex…” · 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 Virginia Woolf. Use the credit shown above instead.
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Provenance
Where the line really comes from
Work
The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan
Published
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1932, pp. 63–64
Speaker
Ferenc Molnár, as recorded by drama critic George Jean Nathan
Popular wording
“Writing is like sex…”: an anonymous later rewording, credited to Woolf online
We were sitting one morning two Summers ago, Ferenc Molnár, Dr. Rudolf Kommer and I, in the little garden of a coffee-house in the Austrian Tyrol. “Your writing?” we asked him. “How do you regard it?” Languidly he readjusted the inevitable monocle to his eye. “Like a whore,” he blandly ventured. “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.”
Nathan, 1932
Transcribed by Quote Investigator, which marks this citation “Verified on paper”. Wikiquote reproduces the same passage. The “Writing is like sex” version credited to Woolf is a later rewording with no identified source.
Quote Investigator ↗ (2011, notes reformatted 2025) begins its chronology with Nathan’s 1932 Intimate Notebooks, where Molnár says “Like a whore”. QI concludes the quip was “probably first constructed by Ferenc Molnár around 1930.”
A 1958 Village Voice column by Nat Hentoff quoted crime writer Ed Lacy crediting “Writing is like prostitution” to Molière. QI ↗ calls this the earliest Molière attribution it has found and suggests Lacy may have misheard “Molnár”.
Wikiquote ↗ lists “Writing is like sex…” under Misattributed on its Virginia Woolf page and points to Quote Investigator and the Nathan passage.
The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain ↗ rates the line “Close but no cigar”. It credits Quote Investigator’s Molnár finding and notes that Woolf herself compared writing to prostitution.
The “Writing is like sex” wording credited to Woolf has no identified author or first publication, so we assert no copyright status for it. The closest documented source, Nathan’s Intimate Notebooks, was first published in 1932. Under this site’s rules that date (1931 or later) is too recent to treat as public domain.
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
How the quip changed hands
One cynical joke about selling out has been passed between at least five famous names. Its wording drifted from “whore” to “prostitution” to the softened “sex” that now carries Woolf’s name.
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Popular onlineVirginia Woolf Misattributed
Quote Investigator ↗ says the Woolf connection “appears to be rather recent” and gives a Goodreads listing as its example. It suggests a 1999 Modern Fiction Studies paper on Woolf’s prostitution metaphors may have encouraged the link.
✕
From 1958Molière Misattributed
The earliest Molière credit QI found is in Ed Lacy’s novel Breathe No More, My Lady, as quoted in the Village Voice in 1958. QI found no French or English source from Molière himself (QI ↗).
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1960 lectureAd Reinhardt Quoted it
In his eleventh “Rule of Ethical Conduct” the painter put the saying in quotation marks without naming a source. It was later sometimes credited to him directly (QI ↗).
✕
1960s anecdotePhilippe Halsman Used a variant
Secondhand accounts, including Leonard Nimoy’s memoir I Am Spock (1995), have the photographer reciting a version about his own career (QI ↗).
✓The first citation in QI’s chronology is Ferenc Molnár, quoted by George Jean Nathan in 1932: “Like a whore… now—I do it for money” (Quote Investigator ↗).
Context
Why Woolf’s name stuck
Woolf did joke about writing for money in sexual terms, which may be why the misattribution feels plausible. The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain points to a letter she wrote to Violet Dickinson on 8 June 1903: “I have sold my brains, which are my virtue. Never any lost woman felt so degraded as I do tonight” (Letters, vol. 1, p. 79). The Society credits the scholar Celia Marshik with noticing that Woolf compared prostitution and writing, and suggests this “may have led to the association of her name with similar sayings” (VWSGB ↗).
The neat three-step joke itself (love, then friends, then money) is Molnár’s, as far as Quote Investigator can trace. Later retellings in 1949, 1962, 1977 and in The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations (1997) keep crediting him (QI ↗).
“Like a whore,” he blandly ventured.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Born Ferenc Neumann in Budapest, Molnár wrote The Paul Street Boys (1906) and stage hits including Liliom (1909), The Guardsman (1910) and The Swan (1920). He was known as a wit and raconteur. He left Europe for New York in January 1940 to escape the persecution of Hungarian Jews, and died there in 1952. Quote Investigator believes he probably first built this quip around 1930.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest citation in Quote Investigator’s chronology
George Jean Nathan, The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), 63–64, quoting Ferenc Molnár; traced by Quote Investigator, January 17, 2011 (notes updated January 17, 2025), https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/01/17/for-pleasure-for-money/.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money’?” Last verified 2 Nov 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/writing-is-like-sex-first-you-do-it-for-love-then-you-do-it/