"It Shouldn't Be Printed At All. It Should Be Burnt" — 23 Books Writers Regret Writing

Historian Lucy Worsley told The Guardian that Sherlock eventually just became a cash cow for Doyle, who also wrote far-less-read historical novels. He killed off Holmes when he made him enough money, but brought him back ten years later for over a million dollars — "he would have hated the fact that today, 93 years after his death, his historical novels lie unread, while his ‘cheap’ – but beloved – detective lives forever on our screens," Worsley says.

When a fan gave him a specially-bound copy of some of his books, the Metamorphosis author said "My scribbling… is nothing more than my own materialisation of horror. It shouldn't be printed at all. It should be burnt." 

He ordered his friend Max Brod to burn many copies after his death, too, though he did refer to some of his writing as "valid." It seems his novels, The Trial and The Castle, were among the books he wanted burned — though Brod published them anyway.

The author seems to have felt trapped by his success, writing, "I wanted to escape from [children’s lit] as I had once wanted to escape from Punch; as I have always wanted to escape... In vain. England expects the writer, like the cobbler, to stick to his last." Milne's son, the real-life Christopher Robin, was also relentlessly bullied for the character his father created. 

The book was savaged by critics, with The Observer calling it "regrettable, if not unreadable." Fleming himself wrote that "the experiment has obviously gone very much awry." In fact, he was so unhappy with the novel's reception that he told the studio making the movie that they could only take the name, and had to change the entire story. 

He also asked his publisher to take the book out of print.

Part of the reason he seemed unhappy with it is because "it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die." 

He added, "I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation, and the same may be said of Lawrence and Lady Chatterley’s Lover," The International Anthony Burgess Foundation shared.

"I think of it as my Star Trek novel," she said of the book. She explained, "When I was young, a lot of people wrote about going to another world and finding either little green men or little brown men, and they were always less in some way. They were a little sly, or a little like 'the natives' in a very bad, old movie... People ask me why I don’t like Survivor, my third novel. And it’s because it feels a little bit like that."    

Some copies now sell for over £200.

After the movie came out, Proulx said she got sent endless rewritten copies of her own story from fans who wanted a different storyline, or different endings, or both. She said it  "just drives me wild," adding "I wish I’d never written the story...  It’s just been the cause of hassle and problems and irritation since the film came out. Before the film it was all right."

She didn't want to write the series, which she called "moral pap for the young."  Writing to a friend about marrying Jo off, she said, "I didn’t dare to refuse and out of perversity went and made a funny match for her." She seemed to regret this decision.

Her grandson, Matthew Prichard, told The Radio Times she wanted to "exorcise" the detective from her public image, despite the fact he was her "bread and butter." She had wanted to kill him off 30 years earlier than when the book in which he died was published, calling him a "detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep." 

"What I now know, which wasn’t known when I wrote Jaws, is that there is no such thing as a rogue shark which develops a taste for human flesh,’’ he said in 2000. "No one appreciates how vulnerable they are to destruction."

"All that sort of publicity leads to strangers hearing of my real name in connection with the books, and to my being pointed out to, and stared at by strangers, and treated as a 'lion'... And I hate that so intensely that sometimes I almost wish I had never written any books at all," he said of his fame. 

After all, the nanny in her books was very different to the Disney version. "Feed the birds and what have you got? Fat birds!", Poppins said in the novels; the author described Mary Poppins as someone who "never wastes time being nice." Travers also disliked the fact that Disney made Mrs Banks a Suffragette.

"When I'm gone, that's it," he shared. "What's down on the paper, it says 'The End,' that's it. 'Cause right now I'm busy writing the end of the longest story I've ever written, which is me." He had previously regretted the final cut of the iconic Star Trek episode he wrote (City on the Edge of Forever), too. When he accepted an award for the episode, he dedicated it to "the memory of the script they butchered, and in respect to those parts of it that had the vitality to shine through the evisceration."

He said that while "The book told unpleasant truths, and anyone who doesn’t feel a qualm of regret at throwing a blanket over the truth is an *sshole with no conscience," he thought it was a "possible accelerant" for violent crimes. In the end, "I pulled it because in my judgment it might be hurting people, and that made it the responsible thing to do," he wrote. 

He claimed The Drowned World was his first novel, even though he wrote The Wind From Nowhere first.

Moore believed he'd be given the rights to his works back after they'd been out of print for a year. But there was one problem — DC never took them out of print. "Fair enough. You have managed to successfully swindle me, and so I will never work for you again," he said of the deal.

He since gave up on writing comics, saying that while he'll "always love and adore the comics medium… the comics industry and all of the stuff attached to it just became unbearable."

While he later said he was a little bit harsh on the book, it was still the lowest possible grade he could have given himself  — his scale only went to "D." 

The highly personal novels exposed his private life far too much for the author. "It fills me with sadness every time I talk about it," he said when interviewed; "I gave away my family,” the author (who since moved to a remote Swedish village) said. "Everybody can see us." 

"I knocked up B for B and of course just after it appeared Oranges [Are Not The Only Fruit] won the Whitbread and then I just didn’t make sense to people," she said.

The author wrote in Confessions, "In spite of the fact that during these fifteen years [which included the time he wrote War and Peace] I regarded writing as a trivial endeavor, I continued to write. I had already tasted the temptations of authorship, the temptations of enormous monetary rewards and applause for worthless work, and I gave myself up to it as a means of improving my material situation and as a way of stifling any questions in my soul concerning the meaning of my life and of life in general." 

"There were a few copies sold, and he gave me one; but afterwards he took possession of it, and no doubt burned it," she explained. "We were enjoined to keep the authorship a profound secret, and of course we did, with one or two exceptions.” 

When a friend of his, J.T. Fields, asked about the book, Hawthorne replied, "You make an inquiry about some supposed former publication of mine... I especially enjoin on you, my dear friend, not to read any unacknowledged page that you may suppose to be mine." 

In a letter to his older brother, he said, "The only good thing in the story is the girl"; later, he'd call it an "unhappy accident." 

"The book was a misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in. The central idea was that violence is an acceptable means to bring about political change. I no longer agree with this," he told the book's fan club in 2000. 

"I am not in agreement with the contents of The Anarchist Cookbook, and I would be very pleased (and relieved) to see its publication discontinued. I consider it a misguided and potentially dangerous publication which should be taken out of print," he added.