It is quite understandable that writers are the kind of people who can get creative when it comes to insulting another person. Given the nature of their job, they are proficient in both swearing and metaphors. But what happens when one of them decides to insult a fellow writer? Well, it just gives us something to smile about.
William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway
“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
Gore Vidal on Truman Capote
“He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”
Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope
“There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”
Vladimir Nabokov on Ernest Hemingway
“As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”
Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac
“That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
D.H. Lawrence on Herman Melville (1923)
“Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like ‘Moby Dick’….One wearies of the grand serieux. There’s something false about it. And that’s Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!”
W. H. Auden on Robert Browning
“I don’t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn’t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.”
Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust
“I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”
Mark Twain on Jane Austen
“I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
Virginia Woolf on James Joyce
“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
William Faulkner on Mark Twain
“A 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.”
D.H. Lawrence on James Joyce
“My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.”
Reblogged this on Cristian Mihai.
Ha ha, they really didn’t hold themselves back.
Not at all. If those had been reviews on Amazon, they’d get banned or something.
They would definitely be rejected or edited. But what a shame that would be now. 🙂
Amazing that these are all impressive writers to those of us who are not writers, yet other writers do not have the same impression. Just goes to show that there are many views to observe out of the same window.
Capote was born in New Orleans and grew up in Alabama then New York. Joke’s on you, Vidal! 😀
I don’t see the point of doing that because you don’t know what circumstances influenced them to write it the way that they did.
This is awesome! Thank you!!!
Ruthless, of course, it all depends on perspective and perception, does it not?
these are like reviews on Goodreads. Haha! Love it
They might be a bit worse than that.
Haha true!
Over the years I’ve developed a deep and abiding love for such author to author criticisms, there’s an art to it … and while I’m fully aware these are flat out insults there’s something almost wholesome about it.
And they’re good for a laugh, Twain on Austen took the gold for me.
I never knew this side of world existed 😀 but its heartbreaking to see…to read these reviews…
Oh my goodness!
Quite a collection !
Quite the insults too!
Absolutely!
The competition must have really been tough among the writers of old.
Had to believe. Most of the statements are really insulting.
Yeah, that’s what insults are… Insulting.
I found them all funny. Nice to see writers behaving this way.
Mark Twain’s quote made me laugh out loud.
That Mark Twain one was hilarious and brutal!🤣