"I never thought that I was very intelligent"
About this Quote
Self-deprecation can be armor, and in Marion Zimmer Bradley's case it reads like a keyhole into how a certain kind of writer survives in public. "I never thought that I was very intelligent" isn’t a confession of ignorance so much as a strategic repositioning: it shifts authority away from credentialed "brains" and toward craft, persistence, and the stubborn, private labor of imagination. For a working genre author who built sweeping worlds and complicated mythologies, the line quietly rejects the prestige economy that likes to treat intelligence as a measurable, gatekept trait.
The intent feels twofold. On the surface, it’s an accessible, disarming posture, the sort that invites readers to identify with the artist rather than fear her. Underneath, it’s a comment on how women in literary culture are trained to pre-empt judgment by judging themselves first. Bradley came up in a period when fantasy and science fiction were routinely dismissed as unserious, and when women who wrote them were expected to be grateful for any attention at all. The sentence carries that pressure: better to sound humble than to be punished for sounding sure.
It also works because it implies an alternative metric. If she’s not "very intelligent", then what built the career? Taste. Curiosity. Empathy. The ability to listen to old stories and hear new tensions inside them. The subtext is that intelligence, as commonly awarded, is often less interesting than insight - and insight is what keeps readers turning pages.
The intent feels twofold. On the surface, it’s an accessible, disarming posture, the sort that invites readers to identify with the artist rather than fear her. Underneath, it’s a comment on how women in literary culture are trained to pre-empt judgment by judging themselves first. Bradley came up in a period when fantasy and science fiction were routinely dismissed as unserious, and when women who wrote them were expected to be grateful for any attention at all. The sentence carries that pressure: better to sound humble than to be punished for sounding sure.
It also works because it implies an alternative metric. If she’s not "very intelligent", then what built the career? Taste. Curiosity. Empathy. The ability to listen to old stories and hear new tensions inside them. The subtext is that intelligence, as commonly awarded, is often less interesting than insight - and insight is what keeps readers turning pages.
Quote Details
| Topic | Humility |
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