12 Things Famous Authors Absolutely Hated

Cats, Coca-Cola, and Tom Cruise top the list.

1. J.K. Rowling hated being a teenager.

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So it's interesting that her Harry Potter series fixated exactly on that time period. Perhaps writing the characters was a bit cathartic for Ms. Rowling?

2. Vladimir Nabokov hated background music.

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He also hated, "canned music, piped-in music, portable music, minstrel music, inflicted music…"

3. Susan Sontag hated cats and Coca-Cola, among other things.

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Brain Pickings posted a section from Sontag’s diaries, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, which included a list of her likes and dislikes. Among the dislikes are, "sleeping in an apartment alone, cold weather, couples, football games, swimming, anchovies, mustaches, cats, umbrellas, being photographed, the taste of licorice, washing my hair (or having it washed), wearing a wristwatch, giving a lecture, cigars, writing letters, taking showers, Robert Frost, German food."

See the full list here.

4. Stephen King hates organized religion.

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"I hate organized religion," he told CNN. "I think it’s one of the roots of real evil that’s in the world. If you really unmask Satan, you’ll probably find that he’s wearing a turnaround collar.”

5. Anne Rice hates Tom Cruise.

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Well, she doesn't hate him as a person, just as a vampire. When he was cast in the film version of Interview with the Vampire, she said Cruise was "no more my vampire Lestat than Edward G. Robinson is Rhett Butler."

However, upon seeing the films she admitted that she was impressed with his portrayal.

6. J.R.R. Tolkien hated Hitler and the Nazi party with a fiery passion.

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This was particularly interesting because many of his academic writings on Germanic history were popular among the Nazi elite. He even considered banning a German translation of The Hobbit after the published requested that Tolkien verify he was Aryan, under Nazi law.

In a scathing letter he wrote to his son, he said, "I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler ... Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light."

7. Mark Twain hated Jane Austen.

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"Every time I read Pride and Prejudice," he said, "I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin bone."

8. David Foster Wallace hated Bret Easton Ellis, and vice versa.

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Bret took to Twitter to lambaste Wallace after reading D.T. Max's biography of Wallace. Including a tweet that read, "I continue to find David Foster Wallace the most tedious, overrated, tortured, pretentious writer of my generation."

Whereas Wallace made his feelings known in an interview when he said, "If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?"

9. Jonathan Franzen hates Twitter, the Internet, e-books, and smartphones.

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He also hates happiness*. (*Probably.)

10. Toni Morrison hates conservatism, and religious attacks on women's reproductive rights in particular.

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In an interview, Morrison stated that humanity should always move toward "more choices, more subtly, more freedom".

11. Jeffrey Eugenides hates concerts.

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He told Details, "I'm getting to the age where I don't like to go to concerts... Unpleasant people become even more unpleasant at concerts."

12. Jack Kerouac hated beatniks and thought they were a bunch of posers.

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Anyone who read On The Road and thought Kerouac was suggested to take up a beatnik lifestyle... you were so epically wrong. Kerouac hated his time searching for answers, and it's pretty clear from the book that he didn't find any. Kerouac was a conservative Catholic and always resented that his writing inspired a revolution.

Sucks for Kerouac!