After an infuriating last-second ambush by an account manager led to me working late on Friday night (he caught me returning from the restroom at two minutes to quitting time!), I spent a good part of the weekend pondering how I could obtain that life of leisure you hear about. I never did come up with anything that seemed workable, but William Faulkner certainly had it all figured out:

…the best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it’s the perfect milieu for an artist to work in. It gives him perfect economic freedom; he’s free of fear and hunger; he has a roof over his head and nothing whatever to do except keep a few simple accounts and to go once every month and pay off the local police. The place is quiet during the morning hours, which is the best time of the day to work. There’s enough social life in the evening, if he wishes to participate, to keep him from being bored; it gives him a certain standing in his society; he has nothing to do because the madam keeps the books; all the inmates of the house are females and would defer to him and call him “sir.” All the bootleggers in the neighborhood would call him “sir.” And he could call the police by their first names.

 

So the only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost. All the wrong environment will do is run his blood pressure up; he will spend more time being frustrated or outraged. My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Sounds about right to me. I can certainly verify the bit about blood pressure, frustration, and outrage. Now, if only I could find a brothel in need of a landlord somewhere in the Salt Lake area… hell, it wouldn’t even have to be a landlord position. I’d be willing to be the ladies’ handy-man, like Paul Newman in The Sting. I could fix a carousel, I think…

(Quoted passage from a 1956 interview with Faulkner published in the Paris Review. Via Andrew Sullivan.)