Literary Snobbery Quotes

Sometimes there's a snobbery among literary types that these people don't really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There's a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level.

I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt.

Nothing is more painful to me than the disdain with which people treat second-rate authors, as if there were room only for the first-raters.

I love to write about Nabokov and also to think about him. I love his attitude that he is incomparable, his lofty judgments and general scorn of other writers - not all of them, of course.

I've got to stop being such a snob about leather-bound books, he reminded himself. E-books do have their moments.

Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, if he is enjoyed by plain persons, and if he can fill several theatres at once, he cannont possibly be worth reading and merits only indifference and disdain.

Most poets are elitist dregs more concerned with proving their skill with a dictionary than communicating ideas with impact.

The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me.

I've spoken out my whole life against the idea of simply dismissing whole areas of fiction by saying it's "genre" and therefore can't be seen as literature.

A "classic" is a book that everybody praises but nobody has read

The distinction between literary and genre fiction is stupid and pernicious. It dates back to a feud between Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James. James won, and it split literature into two streams. But it's a totally false dichotomy.

I'm snobby about books that aren't crime fiction: if I start reading a literary novel and there's no mystery emerging in the first few pages, I'm like, 'Gah, this obviously isn't a proper book. Why would I want to carry on reading it?'

No highbrow literary type would ever say 'Moby Dick' is good but it's just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn't just writing about romantic relationships.

I don't have a problem with many uses of the word genre, just certain ones. I have the most trouble when these labels are used to prevent discussion, to prevent a work from being taken seriously as literature. When we say "genre," we generally mean "something crappy," something that would be sold in an airport.

It's the time of year when the literati give advice on what we should be reading on our summer holidays. These terrifying lists often leave me appalled at my own ignorance, but also suspicious about the pretension of their advocates.

My mother was a part of a reading group, but they would never come near science fiction because they think it's not for them.

If you write chick lit, and if you're a New Yorker, and if your book becomes the topic of pop-culture fascination, the paper might make dismissive and ignorant mention of your book. If you write romance, forget about it. You'll be lucky if they spell your name right on the bestseller list.

There's a bizarre prejudice that exists in the New York publishing establishment that any work outside the tri-state area is being done by trained chimpanzees, that geography screens out sensibility. There's an idea that all Los Angeles writing is about the movie industry, that it's vulgar, shallow and banal.

With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.

People have proven over and over that they will read if they are given something they like. The problem with reading is not reading, its that almost everything out there sucks. For so long, publishing has been run by a cartel of snobby pseudo-intellectual failed writers, and the resulting output has reflected not what the market wants, but what they think people are supposed to read.

That Plato's Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people, is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history.

I thought I'd been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing young adult literature.

The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're ignored by everybody else.