Art & Creativity Quote by Jacqueline Susann

A little defiance goes a long way when the gatekeepers are convinced they own the locks. Jacqueline Susann's line is blunt, even bratty, and that's the point: it refuses the polite choreography of literary legitimacy. The doubled-down "write" and the casual "gonna" turn authorship into muscle memory rather than a sacred calling. She's not pleading for a seat at the table; she's flipping the table and writing on the floor.

The specific intent is autonomy, but the subtext is class war inside the book world. Susann became synonymous with glossy, scandal-tinged bestsellers like Valley of the Dolls, fiction that critics often treated as cultural fast food: addictive, profitable, and therefore suspicious. When she insists "no one's gonna tell me how", she's not only rejecting editorial interference. She's rejecting the entire premise that taste-makers get to define "real" writing and that commercial appeal is evidence of artistic emptiness.

Context matters because Susann worked in an era when women who wrote about sex, ambition, and female desire were routinely patronized, then punished for selling too well. Her insistence reads as a preemptive strike against the predictable critique: that her voice needs refinement, restraint, improvement. The repetition functions like a stomped foot, but it also functions like a manifesto for mass-market storytelling. If the cultural elite wants literature to behave, Susann's answer is to misbehave loudly, on purpose, and in print.