Art & Creativity Quote by Elizabeth George

Elizabeth George’s line draws a clean, bracing boundary between craft and coronation. She positions herself where working novelists actually live: in the daily grind of plot, character, sentences that have to carry a reader to the next page. “I attempt” is doing quiet work here. It’s modest on the surface, but it’s also a claim of jurisdiction: the only honest part of authorship is the attempt, the discipline. Everything else, especially the glittering label of “Literature,” is out of her hands.

The subtext is a pushback against the contemporary critical ecosystem that confuses immediacy with authority. The “pack of critics around the globe” is pointed phrasing - critics become a roving swarm, noisy and self-replicating, less like thoughtful readers and more like a reputational machine. George isn’t anti-criticism so much as anti-premature verdict. In a culture of hot takes and instant rankings, she insists that aesthetic value isn’t a breaking-news event.

Context matters: George is a bestselling crime novelist, a genre writer often subject to the old, tired gatekeeping that treats “literary” as a walled garden and “popular” as a consolation prize. By centering “a good novel” rather than “literature,” she reframes the contest. Quality is functional first: does it move, persuade, illuminate, entertain without cheating? Canonization, she argues, is slow chemistry - decided by “the ages,” not the current round of tastemakers.

It works because it’s both defensive and liberating: a refusal to audition for prestige, and a reminder that longevity is the only critic with real teeth.