Art & Creativity Quote by Len Deighton

Deighton’s line isn’t a lament about talent; it’s an accusation about permission. The sting comes from how casually he dismantles the myth of “natural” literary scarcity among working-class people. He doesn’t say they can’t write, or even that they lack time (though they often do). He points at the softer, more effective barrier: an internalized rulebook that tells you which voices count as “authors” and which should stay safely in the role of subject, worker, or colorful background.

The phrase “encouraged to believe” matters. It pins responsibility on a whole ecosystem - schools that reward certain accents and references, publishing that treats working-class experience as niche unless processed through a palatable lens, media that equates authority with polish. It’s cultural gatekeeping masquerading as meritocracy. The real violence here is psychological: the pre-emptive self-censorship that happens before a manuscript exists, when someone decides their story is “not a book,” their sentences “not proper,” their life “not interesting in the right way.”

Deighton, a writer who moved comfortably between popular genres and serious historical work, understands that “books” are both art and credential. They confer status. By framing authorship as something “permitted,” he exposes literature as a controlled space, policed less by explicit bans than by learned modesty and class-coded intimidation. The intent is bracingly democratic: if the obstacle is permission, then the fight isn’t to find genius - it’s to dismantle the social cues that tell people genius is someone else’s job.