Art & Creativity Quote by Jackie Collins

Hollywood loves to sell itself as a factory of dreams, but Jackie Collins treats it like a factory of illiteracy with better lighting. The jab lands because it’s not just snobbery about reading; it’s a diagnosis of how status works in celebrity culture. “Vanity Fair” isn’t named as a literal enemy so much as a symbol of curated sophistication: the magazine you can be seen with, the kind of literacy that’s more accessory than appetite. Collins is puncturing a scene where being “informed” means knowing the right gossip, the right takes, the right people.

Her real flex is the last line. “I can basically write about anybody without getting caught” isn’t a confession of laziness; it’s a weaponized understanding of the ecosystem. Collins built a career on thinly veiled roman-a-clef fiction that drew its charge from recognition and denial at the same time. The subtext is deliciously cynical: Hollywood is too self-involved, too publicity-managed, too busy performing intelligence to do the unglamorous work of actually reading and cross-checking. That’s how power protects itself - not by being unassailable, but by being distracted.

Context matters: Collins wrote in an era when celebrity was consolidating into an industry, and “serious” culture still tried to gatekeep what counted as literature. She turns that hierarchy inside out. If the elite don’t read, then the so-called trash novelist isn’t marginal; she’s the one holding the receipts, hiding them in plain sight.