Authors should have a gift for words, but sometimes they turn that gift on other authors.
Here's a snippet from a list of the
30 harshest author-on-author insults in history:
30. Gustave Flaubert on George Sand
“A great cow full of ink.”
28. Friedrich Nietzsche on Dante Alighieri
“A hyena that wrote poetry on tombs.”
27. Harold Bloom on J.K. Rowling (2000)
“How to read ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’? Why, very
quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it?
Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling
will have to do.”
26. Vladimir Nabokov on Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Dostoevky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons
suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in
the tragic misadventures of human dignity — all this is difficult to
admire.”
23. H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw
“An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”
22. Joseph Conrad on D.H. Lawrence
“Filth. Nothing but obscenities.”
18. Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen
“Miss Austen’s novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in
artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English
society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life
so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer . . .
is marriageableness.”
16. Charles Baudelaire on Voltaire (1864)
“I grow bored in France — and the main reason is that everybody here
resembles Voltaire…the king of nincompoops, the prince of the
superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father
Gigone of the editors of Siecle.”
14. Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
8. Elizabeth Bishop on J.D. Salinger
“I HATED [Catcher in the Rye]. It took me days to go through it,
gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him
every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?”
5. Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust (1948)
“I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”
4. Mark Twain on Jane Austen (1898)
“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.”
3. Virginia Woolf on James Joyce
“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
2. William Faulkner on Mark Twain (1922)
“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.”
1. D.H. Lawrence on James Joyce (1928)
“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.”
Extras from the comments:
Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman:
“Every word she writes is a lie, including the ands and the thes.”
Mark Twain on Jane Austen:
Just the omission of Jane Austen’s books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.
William Hazlitt on Coleridge: “everlasting inconsequentiality marks all he does.
Via persephonemagazine.com
