Quotes About Literary prejudice

When I was a boy in the late 1950s, the public library refused to stock books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. They were regarded as vulgar, ill-written potboilers.

I was gravely warned by some of my female acquaintances that no woman could expect to be regarded as a lady after she had written a book.

I don't read 'chick lit, ' fantasy or science fiction but I'll give any book a chance if it's lying there and I've got half an hour to kill.

L]iterature is always badly served when an author's artistic insight yields place to stereotype and malice. -Home and Exile

Renée winced. "It turned out to be The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Our only copy. If I had known what he was going to do with it, I would've given him a copy of Atlas Shrugged." "On

I always say 'thriller;' if they see you're a woman - and you're a blond woman - people assume you're writing about cats and romances where somebody has died.

We have also an edition of The Trial, by the notorious Jew, Kafka. Berlin would appreciate it, I am thinking, if this too was added to the bonfire. Also the works of that decadent lesbian Bolshevik, Jane Austen.

Between the two dream coasts, we're just called flyover country... If you aren't known as an amorphous Eastern Seaboard writer, you're dismissed as a regional author.

He picks up a book and begins to read, but he is not attending to what he reads and he has got to page 22 before he discovers it is a novel – the sort of work which above all others he most despises – and he puts it down in disgust.

The prejudice is still there, but it's breaking down. You have writers like Michael Chabon and The Yiddish Policemen's Union. He's a writer who's determined to break down genre barriers. He's done amazing things.

Young adult author Richelle Mead holds the distinction to perhaps be the only author ever to have a book banned... before it was even written.

I remember having to read 'The Old Man and the Sea,' and I didn't want to read it; I didn't want to like Ernest Hemingway. I was being a stubborn teenager.

Novels, as everyone knew, were for women and for people who had nothing better to do.

Short stories are often treated as the poor cousins of novels.

I have a colleague who feels anyone over the age of twenty-one caught reading a Harry Potter novel should be executed without trial, but that strikes me as unreasonable; the fact that they're written for British thirteen-year-olds probably means they're the right speed for 90 percent of American adults.

1894, George Saintsbury was confident that "a fondness for Miss Austen" could be considered "itself a patent of exemption from any possible charge of vulgarity.

Why is someone only passionate about books if they're into literary books that win prizes? Why can't you be passionate about books and only read romance?

A lot of people have read the Mira Grant books who are not urban fantasy readers, and they would never have picked up a book with an urban fantasist's name on the cover, but then they go on to read my urban fantasy and like it.

It is my contention that the population in general and male literary critics in particular entertain a negative image of women and their words, to the extent that it is widely believed that you don't have to read women's writing to know it's no good!

Dismissing fantasy writing because some of it is bad is exactly like saying I'm not reading Jane Eyre because it is a romance and I know romance is crap.

At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a [Catholic], and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both." Within