Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.

The line wryly maps a writer’s changing motivations onto a deliberately provocative analogy: an activity that begins as private desire (“for love”), becomes socially mediated (“for your friends”), and can end as commodified labor (“for money”). Read this way, it comments on the tension between artistic vocation and the marketplace—how publication, reputation, and professionalization can reshape an initially intimate impulse into something performed for an audience and, eventually, for income. Even when used about Woolf, the sentiment fits broader modernist anxieties about patronage, readership, and the economics of authorship, though the attribution itself is doubtful.