Art & Creativity Quote by Jackie Collins

Jackie Collins lands this line like a perfectly timed side-eye: the scandal isn’t that her books got criticized, it’s that the criticism often arrived pre-loaded, untouched by the actual pages. The intent is both defensive and offensive. Defensive, because she’s naming a familiar literary prejudice against “commercial” women’s fiction: the assumption that stories about sex, glamour, and power must be shallow, disposable, morally suspect. Offensive, because she’s flipping the burden of legitimacy back onto the gatekeepers. If you didn’t read it, you didn’t earn the authority to dismiss it.

The subtext is about class, taste, and gender policing. Collins wrote page-turners that sold in the millions and made polite culture nervous. Her detractors weren’t always arguing with her prose; they were arguing with what her success represented: women buying pleasure, fantasy, and agency in paperback form, without needing institutional approval. “Never read them” is a sly indictment of a cultural hierarchy that treats popularity as evidence of inferiority and female-coded entertainment as automatically unserious.

Context matters: Collins built an empire in an era when the literary establishment often treated mass-market fiction like a contaminant. Her point isn’t that all criticism is invalid; it’s that a lot of it is really reputation management. The line works because it refuses the usual apology tour. It’s not begging to be taken seriously. It’s exposing how often “seriousness” is just a costume worn by people who don’t want to admit they’re judging the audience as much as the art.