Life & Wisdom Quote by Jacqueline Susann

Jacqueline Susann’s line is a perfectly aimed grenade lobbed at the literary establishment: stop polishing the halo, start writing the book people can’t put down. Coming from the author of Valley of the Dolls - a bestseller routinely sneered at by gatekeepers - it reads less like anti-intellectualism than counter-programming. Susann is refusing the priesthood of “Literature” as a social club, complete with passwords, posture, and the quiet terror of not being taken seriously.

The specific intent is practical and defensive at once. “Concerned with literature” means writing toward prestige: chasing reviewers, imitating approved styles, smoothing off anything gaudy, horny, or melodramatic that might offend the tasteful. Susann flips the hierarchy. The novelist’s job isn’t to audition for canonization; it’s to generate narrative pressure, appetite, velocity. Her phrasing is blunt on purpose: “any novelist” makes it a general rule, not a personal grievance, even as the personal grievance hums underneath.

The subtext: literature, as an institution, can be a trap that narrows the imagination. When writers aim at “literature,” they start performing for a small, self-referential audience and confuse reverence with craft. Susann’s world was mid-century publishing where “serious” fiction was coded as restrained, masculine, and critically legible, while mass appeal - especially by a woman writing unabashedly about ambition, sex, pills, and fame - was treated as suspect. Her sentence is a declaration of sovereignty: the book is the point, not the lecture hall. In that sense it’s also a prophecy about today’s culture wars between prestige and popularity, where success still gets recast as proof of shallowness.