"I hate to be categorized"
About this Quote
“I hate to be categorized” is a refusal disguised as a modest complaint, the kind writers deploy when they can feel the filing cabinet closing around them. On the surface, Martin C. Smith is pushing back against labels - genre, identity, ideology, brand. The verb matters: “hate” is blunt and visceral, less a preference than a recoil. It frames categorization as something done to you, not chosen by you, a soft form of capture.
The subtext is a negotiation with power. Categories are how institutions sort: publishers decide where a book lives, critics decide what tradition it belongs to, algorithms decide who sees it. For a writer, being categorized can mean being made legible in the marketplace while becoming less legible as a person. The line quietly admits that visibility often comes at the cost of compression: you get discoverability, and in exchange you become a “type.”
It also works as a strategic act of self-authorship. By rejecting the box, Smith claims the right to contradiction - to write across tones, subjects, and moral registers without having past work used as a leash. There’s a little irony here too: declaring you “hate to be categorized” is itself a recognizable category, the writer’s version of “don’t label me.” That tension is the point. The quote captures a modern anxiety: in a culture that runs on tags, the insistence on being untaggable becomes both resistance and a brand, whether you want it to or not.
The subtext is a negotiation with power. Categories are how institutions sort: publishers decide where a book lives, critics decide what tradition it belongs to, algorithms decide who sees it. For a writer, being categorized can mean being made legible in the marketplace while becoming less legible as a person. The line quietly admits that visibility often comes at the cost of compression: you get discoverability, and in exchange you become a “type.”
It also works as a strategic act of self-authorship. By rejecting the box, Smith claims the right to contradiction - to write across tones, subjects, and moral registers without having past work used as a leash. There’s a little irony here too: declaring you “hate to be categorized” is itself a recognizable category, the writer’s version of “don’t label me.” That tension is the point. The quote captures a modern anxiety: in a culture that runs on tags, the insistence on being untaggable becomes both resistance and a brand, whether you want it to or not.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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