Literary Disdain Quotes

There are two ways of disliking poetry, one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.

It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.

I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.

I hate science fiction.

The vast majority of free verse is ghastly. Utterly ghastly. No one reads it. No one listens to it.

My dear Smollett ... disgraces his talent by writing those stupid romances called history.

All writers should be put in a box and thrown in the sea.

Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day.

The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

I became a writer because during several of the most important years of my life, writing seemed to me to be the most unreal, unattractive, and unecessary idea ever imposed upon the human race.

Books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. . . . It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.

It's funny because I think that genre literature can be looked down on by literature literature. And I like that! I like being scorned; I like people looking down their noses at us a little bit... It gives us a little chip on our shoulder.

I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for the average reader. You can really see this in the letters of such people as Joyce and Virginia Woolf.