Well-known for his scathing line on fellow rock musicians, Noel Gallagher has aimed a rather more unexpected broadside at imaginative writing, branding the art of fiction "a waste of fucking time".

"I only read factual books. I can't think of ... I mean, novels are just a waste of fucking time," Gallagher told the writer Danny Wallace in an interview to mark his becoming GQ magazine's Icon of the Year. "I can't suspend belief in reality … I just end up thinking, 'This isn't fucking true'."

The guitarist and songwriter went on to explain how he preferred reading "about things that have actually happened", citing Ernest R May's depiction of the White House during the Cuban missile crisis, The Kennedy Tapes, as the kind of book he can "get into".

"I'm reading this book at the minute … Thinking, 'Wow, this actually fucking happened, they came that close to blowing the world up!'"

For Gallagher, the driving force behind the band Oasis during the 1990s, the literary industry is bound up with issues of class, arguing that "people who write and read and review books are fucking putting themselves a tiny little bit above the rest of us who fucking make records and write pathetic little songs for a living."

According to the Bookseller's Cathy Retzenbrink, Gallagher has identified an "incredibly serious point".

"He's saying what loads of people in this country think, but don't normally have a platform to say," Retzenbrink added. "There are vast amounts of people who feel this way, who do feel that people who are comfortable with words look down on them."

This isn't necessarily a problem for the books industry, she explained, but with a third of adults never reading for pleasure and one in six adults having literacy problems it's a problem "for the country".