Critics Quote by Edward Abbey

A hack writer who would have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tried out a few of the old proven 'sure-fire' literary skeletons…

— William Faulkner

“Hacks are killing our national literary culture. America treats best-sellers like literary lions and literary lions worse than stray dogs.”

— David B. Lentz

There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.

— John le Carre

Hack fiction exploits curiosity without really satisfying it or making connections between it and anything else in the world.

— Vincent Canby

In secluding himself too much from society, an author is in danger of losing that intimate acquaintance with life which is the only sure…

— Christian Nestell Bovee

I think anyone who's not as good a writer as me is absolutely a hack, and I think anybody who's a slightly better writer…

— Chuck Klosterman

Writing is the only trade I know of in which sniveling confessions of extreme incompetence are taken as credentials probative of powers to astound…

— George V Higgins

“If a novelist were so uncouth and possessed of so little moral sense that he should write of illicit love, his book would be…

— Clyde Brion Davis

Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.

— Fay Weldon

You know, you can be really quite subversive in popular fiction, which is capable of taking on big issues of politics, war, the rise…

— Robert Harris

The good thing about writing fiction is that you can get back at people.

— John Grisham

“Writing novels allows the novelist to spend much of his time in a fictional world, which is really the only or at least the…

— Javier Marías