Original artwork, not a still
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
— Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech · 1962
Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
The speaker jokes that writing books is so precarious and uncertain that horse racing, a byword for gambling, looks safe and steady by comparison. It is wry self-deprecation about a writer's livelihood, treating literary work as the bigger gamble.
Context reviewed
