authors insulting other authors
Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope
āThere are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.ā
Evelyn Waugh on Marcel ProustĀ
āI am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.ā
Mark Twain on Jane Austen
āI havenāt any right to criticize books, and I donāt do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I canāt conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read āPride and Prejudice,ā I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.ā
Virginia Woolf on James Joyce
ā[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.ā
William Faulkner on Mark TwainĀ
āA hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.ā
Henry James on Edgar Allan PoeĀ
āAn enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.ā
W. H. Auden on Robert Browning
āI donāt think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didnāt care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.ā
William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway
āHe has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.ā
Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner
āPoor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?ā
Virginia Woolf on Aldous Huxley
āAll raw, uncooked, protesting.ā
H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw
āAn idiot child screaming in a hospital.ā
Martin Amis on Miguel Cervantes
āReading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 ā the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that āDon Quixoteā could do.ā
Gore Vidal on Truman Capote
āHeās a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.ā
Dylan Thomas on Rudyard Kipling
āMr Kipling ā¦ stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.ā
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