While being cross-examined during a trial in which he accused a critic of libel, James McNeill Whistler was questioned as to why he charged two hundred guineas for what amounted to two days of work. That was his response.

This quote reminds me alot of a parable in Gordon Macenzie’s Orbiting the Giant Hairball where an oil baron buys a dairy farm and berates the cows for not working hard, where in reality they are producing milk but the action is unseen.