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The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History

[Editor's note: While your Flavorwire editors take a much-needed holiday break, we're revisiting some of our most popular features of the year. This post was originally published June 19, 2011.] Sigh. Authors just don’t insult each other like they used to. Sure, Martin Amis raised some eyebrows when he claimed he would need brain damage to write children’s books, and recent Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan made waves when she disparaged the work that someone had plagiarized, but those kinds of accidental, lukewarm zingers are nothing when compared to the sick burns of yore. It stands to reason, of course, that writers would be able to come up with some of the best insults around, given their natural affinity for a certain turn of phrase and all. And it also makes sense that the people they would choose to unleash their verbal battle-axes upon would be each other, since watching someone doing the same thing you’re doing — only badly — is one of the most frustrating feelings we know. So we forgive our dear authors for their spite. Plus, their insults are just so fun to read. Click through for our countdown of the thirty harshest author-on-author burns in history, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites in the comments!

30. Gustave Flaubert on George Sand

“A great cow full of ink.”

29. Robert Louis Stevenson on Walt Whitman

“…like a large shaggy dog just unchained scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.”

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.”

arrow127 Responses

  1. sumarumi
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    I am in accord with any criticism of the foul-mindedness of Lawrence and the mimsy snobberies of Austen.

  2. ohcoya
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Awesome…BUT none of the great flames from the Harlem Renaissance versus Black Arts Movement culture wars?! Ellison and Baldwin alone could add three or four to this list.

  3. Ellis Amburn
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman:

    “Every word she writes is a lie, including the ands and the thes.”

  4. Ellis Amburn
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Mary McCarthy on James Jones:

    “Death is his business.”

  5. ellis Amburn
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    H.G. Wells on Henry James:

    “A hippopotams trying to pick up a pea.”

  6. Ginab
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    I don’t believe Virginia was insulting. What’s wrong with raw, uncooked, protesting?

  7. Alan
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Stephen King has some pretty choice words for Stephanie Meyer: “Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”

  8. Kevin
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Homer J. Simpson on Walt Whitman

    “Leaves of grass my ass”

  9. Andrew
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    I love that Stephen King quote. I’m also a big Martin Amis fan and was just tickled to find he hated reading “Don Quixote” as much as I did.

  10. 8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Ha, Mark Twain’s comment was the best. He was not shy about his likes or dislikes, was he?

  11. Steph
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Hemingway on Wyndham Lewis: “[Lewis had] the eyes of an unsuccessful rapist.”

  12. 8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Francisco de Quevedo on Luis de Gongora (Translation)

    Once there was a man stuck to a nose,
    it was a nose more marvellous than weird,
    it was a nearly living web of tubes,
    it was a swordfish with an awful beard,

    it was a sundial doomed to face the shade,
    an elephant that looked up to the sky,
    it was a nose of hangman and of scribe,
    Ovidius Naso nostrilled all awry,

    it was the bowsprit of a mighty ship,
    like Egypt’s pyramid it pierced the sky,
    it was of noses all of the twelve tribes;

    it was in noseness truly infinite,
    an archnose shudder, and a frightening mask,
    a monstrous chilblain, purpley and fried.

  13. Jean-Paul
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Louis-Ferdinand Céline on D.H.Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”:
    “600 hundred pages for a gamekeeper’s dick, it’s way too long.”

  14. 8 mos, 1 wk ago

    I thought Capote had made the typing remark about Jacqueline Susann.

    Maybe he thought everybody typed.

  15. Suzanne
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    How is Harlan Ellison not on this list?

  16. William MacAdams
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    The actual quotation: “Ulysses is merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges.”
 ~ Virginia Woolf, letter to Lytton Strachey, April 24, 1922

  17. Kevin Phillips Bong
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Keeping in mind that writers are notoriously insecure, envious creatures, these insults can probably be read as the highest form of praise.

  18. Russell
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Oh please…surely somebody has something bad to say about that awful windbag Henry James, king of the parenthetical sentence? When I read Portrait of a Lady, I literally hurled it across the room when I finished it, so angry was I to have wasted the time on it!

  19. Johann Onevr
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    What a nice mix of jealousy and wit. Except for Nabokov, that guy had some issues. Well, considering his only lasting achievement is a book that would have been infinitely better if it was pedophile fantasies instead of a lyrical mystery, it’s not very surprising. Especially amusing is the Dostoevsky quote – his own dealing with guilt (in Lolita) is so below average, it’s ridiculously stupid, when more so than the old joke about Crime and Punishment which sums it up as “guy commits murder, feels sick, wanders about, feels sick again”.

  20. Tim Bob
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Actually Vidal saying Capote’s death was “A good Career move.” is a bit harsher than calling a gay man a Kansas housewife.

  21. Jess
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    What, no H.L Mencken? He built his career on insults. For example, regarding Gertrude Stein: “It is the great achievement of Miss Stein that she has made English easier to write and harder to read”

  22. Taryntula
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Charlotte Bronte on Austen:

    “. . . anything energetic, poignant, heartfelt, is utterly out of place in commending these works; all such demonstration the authoress would have met with a well-bred sneer . . . She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well; there is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy in the painting: she ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound: the Passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy Sisterhood; even to the Feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition; too frequent converse with them would ruffle the smooth elegance of her progress. Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands, and feet; what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study, but what throbs is the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of death–this Miss Austen ignores, she no more, with her mind’s eye, beholds the heart of her race than each man with bodily vision, sees the heart in his heaving breast. Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete, and rather insensible (not senseless) woman . . .”

    Wordy, but interesting, seeing as Bronte wrote “Jane Eyre” which is thought of as low Gothic-romance by many. I love both, so, no hard feelings here ;)

  23. Cole
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    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.

  24. 8 mos, 1 wk ago

    I’ll assume that the omission of any quotes from Dorothy Parker was allow someone else a spot in the top ten.

  25. IndyM
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Gore Vidal v. Norman Mailer
    John Updike v. Tom Wolfe
    Norman Mailer v. Tom Wolfe
    John Irving v. Tom Wolfe
    V.S. Naipaul v. women writers

    All sorts of good quotes are to be had from the aforementioned feuds…

  26. B
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    my favorite was written by william hazlitt about his good friend coleridge: “everlasting inconsequentiality marks all he does.”

  27. Bryan
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    These are nothing. Best literary insult, nay, the best insult I’ve ever heard in my life came from James Ellroy. Mike Davis, the socialist historian, had criticized Ellroy in an academic publication. Ellroy responded, “Being taken to task by Mike Davis in the ‘Chicago Review’ is like being date-raped by a premature ejaculator with a two inch dick.”

  28. 8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Fabulous! I particularly recommend Amis on Cervantes, Baudelaire on Voltire, Faulkner on Hemingway, Wilde on Pope, Nabokov on Hemingway, and Twain on Austen.

  29. tomasz.
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    “A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not” is a pretty extraordinary criticism for Gertrude Stein to have levelled at somebody else.

    also, Johann Onevr:
    “[Nabokov's] only lasting achievement is…”
    yeh, his only lasting achievement. apart from “Pale Fire”. and many of the short stories. and his critical stuff. and his entomological work. totally, man.

  30. Brenda Sharpe
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    The list is missing Dorothy Parker’s classic review of Benito Mussolini’s *The Cardinal’s Mistress*: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

  31. Chris Price
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    @ellis Amburn, your quote made me happy. Henry James was an absolutely awful writer, and I have no idea how he ever managed to hoodwink anyone into thinking his work was even adequate, much less classic.

  32. 8 mos, 1 wk ago

    What a fun article! I loved those quotes!

    I can’t help but wonder how much of this was born of jealousy. :)

  33. JC
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    This article is plagarized wholesale from (http://www.examiner.com/book-in-national/the-50-best-author-vs-author-put-downs-of-all-time)

    Trimming the list down does not make it original material.

    One would assume the author, Emily Temple, would at least acknowledge another source.

  34. Zatty
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Since when was Harold Bloom an author in the way of these other speakers? He’s a critic. I guess publishing volumes of your own theory, or writing forwards to someone else’s work, might get you into the technicality of “author,” but he’s a pundit. Every famous pundit of the literary field has said something awful about some author or another. You could pad this entire list out with inanities he, James Wood and Christopher Hitchens have lobbed at authors. It’s their job to be hyperbolic. It’s not so interesting in contrast to authors who created for a living being children to each other, like the other 29.

  35. PJ
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Poor Matt. He’s gone to heaven, no doubt, but he won’t like God.

    Robert Louis Stevenson, on Matthew Arnold

  36. Ari
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    The phrase “the sick burns of yore” makes me weep for America. That folks who find this usage of the word “sick” appropriate or worse, hip, are now old enough to be publishing articles is also making me feel a bit old :P

  37. Gary
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Is it too much to ask that the quotations be attributed to an actual source, so that we can be sure that they’re not part of the vast body of internet-perpetuated apocrypha?

  38. required
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Vladmir Nabokov was a severe homophobe and he treated his own brother like shit.

  39. Max Kumbe
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    V.S. Naipaul on Henry James

    You only have to look at that dreadful American man Henry James. The worst writer in the world actually. He never went out in the world. Yes, he came to Europe and he ‘did’ and lived the writer’s life. He never risked anything. He never exposed himself to anything. He travelled always as a gentleman. When he wrote English Hours about what he was seeing in England – written for an American magazine – this man would write about the races at Epsom and do it all from a distance. He never thought he should mingle with the crowd and find out what they were there for, or how they behaved. He did it all from the top of a carriage or the top of a coach. A lot of his writing is like that. And he exalts his material because he thinks that this subject matter he has alighted on – the grandeur of Europe and the grandeur of American new money – is unbeatable. Elizabeth Hardwick said to me about Henry James many years ago, ‘What’s he going on about? These people he is talking about are just Americans!’ It has the effect that young American people still think they can ‘do a Henry James’ – come to Europe and write a book like Henry James.

  40. Max Kumbe
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Naipaul on Hemingway and Fitzgerald

    Hemingway didn’t know where he was, ever, really. He was so busy being an American and that was his subject matter. You wouldn’t have any idea, from Hemingway or Fitzgerald and their stories or writings about Paris, that Paris was in the most terrible way between the wars. They just talked about the cafes, the drinks and oysters and things like that. They don’t see the larger thing outside. I find it very difficult to read that kind of writing or to take it seriously. This idea of Gay Paris and all of that, that’s what they wrote about. The catastrophe of the wars, the death of men – they weren’t aware of that. Nowadays they don’t go to France to write about it any more. Because when a place is OK, as France now is, it is very hard to know how to write about it. It’s easier to go to places where you can stand out against the local people more easily. You go to India, you go to Nepal. There’s a whole crowd of them. You can scarcely get into the travel agents for these people pushing their way into writing books. You don’t know. The books are sent to me in any number every month. They wouldn’t be sent to you because you’ve not written about India in that way.

  41. Knibber
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    like a large shaggy dog just unchained scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.”

    Whitman would see this comment as compliment, I think.

  42. sourpuss
    8 mos, 1 wk ago

    Well, since we’re being lit’ry, don’t you think it might have been nice to have provided sources for the quotes? Maybe some credit to the compilers of various collections of literary invective?

  43. Roxanne Bland
    8 mos ago

    What? No Dorothy Parker?

  44. EVA K.
    8 mos ago

    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.”
    AHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

  45. TRH
    8 mos ago

    Probably a bit lowbrow for this crowd, but I love Dorothy Parker on A. A. Milne: “Tonstant Weader frowed up.”

  46. 8 mos ago

    The one thing most of them have in common is they make dopey arses of themselves when they try to be spiteful.

  47. 8 mos ago

    Stephen King on Stephenie Meyer: “The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn… She’s not very good.”

    Jealous much, Stephen?

  48. Egle Z.
    8 mos ago

    My personal favourite.
    CS Lewis on JRR Tolkien: “Oh no! Not another fucking elf!”

  49. Tom Hawking
    8 mos ago

    Hemingway and Fitzgerald shit all over Naipaul. In fact, so do plenty of other writers – it’s almost impossible these days to read anything about the miserable old right-wing bastard without it being prefaced by some sort of platitude about him being “acknowledged among the great writers of English prose”… really? By whom? He’s still trading off novels he wrote 40 years ago – in 2011 he’s a bitter old windbag who’s sullying his legacy by becoming a one-man rent-a-controversial-quote machine. Twat.

  50. Tom Hawking
    8 mos ago

    And Stephen King is dead right about JK Rowling and Stephanie Meyer. Meyer’s prose is dreadful.

  51. Steve Dedalus
    8 mos ago

    although, “she’s not very good” from Stephen King on Meyer is probably the least eloquent insult I’ve ever heard an author attempt. His pen should be taken away for not even trying.

  52. Brian Jones
    8 mos ago

    Guten Tag

    aus Gründen schreib ich bewußt Deutsch.

    1904 meinte der spätere Literaturnobellist Thomas Mann (“Die Budenbroks”) zum späteren Professor Theodor Lessing (“Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen”) als Retourkutsche nachdem Literaturkritiker Lessing Autor Mann
    als Lübecker “Marzipanmännchen” beteichnete:

    Der häßliche Zwerg soll doch froh sein daß die Sonne auch auf ihn scheint …

    Besten Gruß;-)

    Brian Jones, PhD. (LSEPS)

  53. jujuducky
    8 mos ago

    You should add the comment JRR Tolkien states about Tarzan.

  54. SMB
    8 mos ago

    I suppose Ambrose Bierce’s pithy “The covers of this book are too far apart.” could be recycled for general use. Don’t know what book he said that about…

  55. L.George Alexander
    8 mos ago

    It goes to show you that even great writers don’t make great critics.

  56. Colette Bancroft
    8 mos ago

    Good list, although it suffers from the omissions of Parker and Mencken, as others have noted. And what about Flannery O’Connor’s martini-dry dig at Harper Lee: “I think for a child’s book it does all right. It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book.”

  57. Tom
    8 mos ago

    James Jones on Hemingway: “The problem with Papa was he always wanted to suck a cock. But when he found the one that fit, it had a double barrel.”

    What Hemingway said about Jones is too obscene to quote here. Yes, more obscene than that, but not as pithy.

  58. Victor Provenzano
    8 mos ago

    Lawrence Durrell on Henry James: “If I were asked to choose between reading Henry James and having my head pressed between two stones, I’d choose the latter.”

  59. Liz Davies
    8 mos ago

    After reading martin Amis’s last book -can’t even remember the title or the subject – I think he wouldn’t even be able to write kids’ books. He would bore them stiff !

  60. Jason Smith
    8 mos ago

    Mark Twain on James Fenimore Cooper:

    Eschew surplusage.

  61. FT
    8 mos ago

    I enjoy Ambrose Bierce’s all purpose rejoinder: “The covers of this book are too far apart.”

  62. Marcus
    8 mos ago

    Is there anything more self-important than a snobbish author?

    *Hint: The answer is “no”.*

  63. 8 mos ago

    So so great. My faves are # 11 and #17.

  64. Fretrix2SQ
    8 mos ago

    Emily Temple, article author,I have some critisizm of your writing: grammar.
    “..if we’VE missed any of your favorites” is incorrect verb tense. It should be “if we missed..”, since you are speaking of this specific occurance, not some unspecified occurance in the past.

    Thank you.
    The grammarman

  65. Proofer3
    8 mos ago

    For an author to speak of another author at all is complimentary in and of itself.
    I notice there’s no George Orwell in here. Perhaps he felt no need to compare himself with others, or maybe he was too busy working.

  66. trifles
    8 mos ago

    Mark Twain’s essay “The Literary Offences of Fenimore Cooper” is a *classic* of the entire bitchy genre.

  67. 8 mos ago

    Ben Jonson of William Shakespeare: “I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, ‘Would he had blotted a thousand,’

  68. 8 mos ago

    How’s this for an insult? “I weep for the trees that were cut down to make the pages of this book”.

    Or this: :”Icky poo”. (Two word rejection of Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull)

  69. Chris
    8 mos ago

    Not one with T.S. Eliot as either the target or the shooter? Amazing.

  70. Felicia
    8 mos ago

    Dostoevsky on Goncharov: “[he] possesses the soul of bureaucrat, no ideas, and the eyes of a boiled fish”

  71. annoyed
    8 mos ago

    Why the hell do we have to click 18 times to see this article? Just put it on one fucking page!

  72. Retromash
    8 mos ago

    Suzanne • June 20th, 2011 at 1:19 pm

    How is Harlan Ellison not on this list?

    Because he can only be entered on a short list.

  73. 8 mos ago

    yore – of long or former times

    You can’t say, “They don’t insult each other like they used to,” and then post an insult directed at JK Rowling. You should have chosen a smaller number if you needed to include someone so recent.

  74. 8 mos ago

    Brenda, that’s what Dorothy parker said about “Atlas Shrugged.”

  75. Krista
    8 mos ago

    How was Greene’s “upstart crow” comment about Shakespeare omitted?

  76. A K. B
    8 mos ago

    I could agree with what was said about Jane Austen and Marcel Proust (could never read their books – was bored to death)

  77. MousePotato
    8 mos ago

    H.L. Menckin on Henry James: “He writes with all the daring of a grandmother smoking marijuana”.

  78. James
    8 mos ago

    Mark Twain discussing Henry James:

    “Once you put one of his books down, you simply can’t pick it up again.”

  79. JJR
    8 mos ago

    Austrian Karl Kraus can be screamingly funny but you have to know German to really appreciate his wit.

  80. Gustavo
    8 mos ago

    Vladimir “nobody” Nabokov should wash his mouth before saying anything bad about Dostoyesvky, an author a million times greater than him.

    I guess he never admired Fyodor because he couldn’t understand real literature

  81. YoBimbo
    8 mos ago

    Add me to the list of those who were disappointed that there were no Dorothy Parker quotes.

  82. JimWilton
    8 mos ago

    It’s too long for this type of list — but I would nominate Twain’s essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”.

  83. Perry Bruder
    8 mos ago

    You missed Hemmingway’s description of Fitzgerald during a time when the latter was suffering a brief illness:

    “He looked like a little dead crusader.”

  84. La Gringa
    8 mos ago

    What’s up with Joseph Conrad? The filth and obscenity make D.H. Lawrence readable! Three cheers for D.H. Lawrence! Conrad only wrote about trinkets and little tiny ships anyway.

  85. urizon
    8 mos ago

    The contemporaneous ones are the best. It’s easy to insult the work of someone long dead.

    On that note, one of my all-time favorites is the unattributed: “Robert Ludlum should have written a novel called ‘The Heimlich Maneuver.’”

  86. Winnie
    8 mos ago

    There was another glaring, “recent” omission – when Francine Prose went off on Maya Angelou…

  87. mike
    8 mos ago

    “..few writers like other writers’ works. The only time they like them is when they are dead or if they have been for a long time. Writers only like to sniff their own turds. I am one of those. I don’t even like to talk to writers, look at them or worse, listen to them. And the worst is to drink with them, they slobber all over themselves, really look piteous, look like they are searching for the wing of the mother.
    I’d rather think about death than about other writers. Far more pleasant.”
    — Charles Bukowski

  88. MikeS
    8 mos ago

    My God, not including Mark Twain on James Fenimore Cooper? Both hilarious and deadly accurate.

  89. the spelling man
    8 mos ago

    @Fretrix2SQ:

    If you say you’re the grammar man you’re still in dire need of a spell checker: it’s “occurrence”, not “occurance”

  90. JR
    8 mos ago

    James Dickey on Rob’t Frost:

    “If it were thought that anything I wrote was influenced by Robert Frost,
    I would take that particular work of mine, shred it, and flush it down
    the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes. A more sententious, holding-
    forth old bore who expected every hero-worshiping adenoidal little twerp
    of a student-poet to hang on to his every word I never saw.”

  91. toedrifter
    8 mos ago

    Frank O’Hara about Russian poets Voznesensky & Evtushenko, ‘Mayakovsky’s hat worn by a horse.’

  92. Nolaramie
    8 mos ago

    Dorothy Parker on The Autobiography of Margot Asquith: “The love affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith shall live forever in the pages of romantic literature.”

  93. eo
    8 mos ago

    Twain on a Henry James novel: “Once I put it down, I couldn’t pick it up.”

  94. 8 mos ago

    I’m surprised that quotes from women were included considering that women can’t write. Mark Twain was right when he said that a female author was like a dog riding a bike. You’re not impressed at how well she can do it, but that she can do it at all…

  95. Jack
    8 mos ago

    All of these are pretty dull, even the Wilde.

  96. 8 mos ago

    This article has been Ideamarked!

  97. 8 mos ago

    Papa used to hit harder than that.
    http://larvatus.livejournal.com/298504.html

  98. Al
    8 mos ago

    Gutenberg(dot)org has Twain’s essay on Cooper’s literary offenses if anyone is interested.

  99. ty
    7 mos, 4 wks ago

    H.G. Wells harshly portrayed James as a hippopotamus laboriously attempting to pick up a pea that has got into a corner of its cage.

  100. Susan
    7 mos, 4 wks ago

    The only thing more amazing than all those supposed genius who utterly fail to even begin to grasp the point/meaning of any Austen novel is the way Charlotte Bronte *almost* gets it. But she can be excused for the same reason I would excuse Austen for calling her “breathy, vulgar, undisciplined” what-have-you: Each is/would be viewing the other through the spectrum of their time/idiom. The others have no excuse.

  101. Mike
    7 mos, 4 wks ago

    Who the hell is Harold Bloom?

  102. David Bartlett
    7 mos, 4 wks ago

    Three left out by Gore Vidal surprise me.
    1. Truman Capote has turned the novel into an art form, a minor art form.
    2. The three most discouraging words in the English language are ‘Joyce Carol Oates.’
    3. On being hit by Norman Mailer for the second time at a party before passing out, “I see Norman that words have failed you again!”

  103. Aditi Chaturvedi
    7 mos, 4 wks ago

    This belongs here too.

    Virginia Woolf on Jane Austen [from 'A Room of One's Own']

    “Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.”

  104. Dom
    7 mos, 3 wks ago

    Not sure if it’s been stated, but perhaps the worst author-on-author burn I’ve ever read was Gore Vidal about Truman Capote. Upon hearing of Capote’s death, Vidal stated something along these lines: “A very good career move.”

  105. 7 mos, 3 wks ago

    I think it’s sad that these men and women–all with their own genius–still could not appreciate each others’ differences and felt they had to denigrate not only the work but also the personalities of their peers. What does that say about writers as a breed? Only that by looking at other writers as competition and attempting to raise ourselves above them by our wit and snark we’re showing ourselves to be small-minded and without kindness. Who wants to be remembered through the ages for that?

  106. 7 mos, 2 wks ago

    The author-on-author criticism I found most valid was Nabokov on Conrad. Many of the ohter criticisms were lesser authors criticizing their betters.

  107. 7 mos, 1 wk ago

    Yikes. So often one generation contemplates another, across a gap, and through a trick of perspective, those on each side believe they view the other from a higher elevation. So many fine writers vilifying other fine writers for being different kinds of writers. I’m grateful that the Commonwealth of Letters is as rich in variety as it is in ego.

  108. Hello!

    I’m enchanted with your blog! I’ve seen this post in portuguese, my language, and I’ve think that is very good know that these geniuses writers have many acid reviews to speak!

    It’s a pleasure meet you!
    Ana Carolina Nonato
    Seis Milênios

  109. C Rowney
    6 mos, 2 wks ago

    “Yikes. So often one generation contemplates another, across a gap, and through a trick of perspective, those on each side believe they view the other from a higher elevation. So many fine writers vilifying other fine writers for being different kinds of writers. I’m grateful that the Commonwealth of Letters is as rich in variety as it is in ego.” Nicely put Manuel and to go against the spirit of this list – I wish I had written it.

  110. jim
    6 mos, 1 wk ago

    Gore Vidal, to Norman Mailer, whilst pinned face-down on the buffet table by him after a fracas between them at a social gathering:

    “Once again, words fail you, Norman.”

  111. 6 mos, 1 wk ago

    A friend of mine once wrote what I take to be a fine summation of the grotesque caricature of an intellectual Martin Amis has become:

    “It’s just bizarre. It’s like he has no real opinions of his own. The Islam thing is entirely about what Hitchens has been banging on about, while the Stalin thing is his Dad’s thing from 30 years ago. It’s funny now to go back and read his anti-nuclear hysteria from the early 80s and see how vapidly narcissistic it sounds.”

    Calling Burroughs a C-grade writer should have been our first clue.

    Oh, and Stephen King is talking out of his ass. Rowling is not a great writer. At best she does a fine job kludging literary tropes together in a fine imitation of talent. That still puts her light years ahead of Meyer, though.

  112. Alex
    6 mos, 1 wk ago

    And Latin Writers?? Where are they???

    Octavio Paz vs Juan Rulfo
    Gabriel García Márquez vs Vargas Llosa
    Juan Saramago vs J. Luis Borges

  113. Chris
    6 mos, 1 wk ago

    Dorothy Parker on A.A.Milne “Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”

  114. K-Star
    6 mos, 1 wk ago

    Oh, Nabokov! That’s pretty rich coming from a man who’s claim to fame is a book about lusting after little girls.

  115. parlance
    6 mos, 1 wk ago

    Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal. – Leo Tolstoy

  116. Saxo Grammaticus
    6 mos, 1 wk ago

    Can’t help but think that if JK Rowling was as mean-spirited as Harold Bloom, she could (with a small fraction on her riches) have him silenced and rendered invisible. All it would take is a wave of the American Express card and the “Harold who?” spell.

  117. Mike
    6 mos, 1 wk ago

    Mark Twain on the Book of Mormon (Joseph Smith) – 1861

    http://truthandgrace.com/twainbom.htm

  118. Christina
    6 mos, 1 wk ago

    Dorothy Parker vs AA Milne- “Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”

  119. Gerard Kalmbach
    5 mos, 3 wks ago

    Two more contemporary insults that I think would bear mention here.

    Stephen Fry on Dan Brown: “I just loathe all those book[s] about the Holy Grail and Masons and Catholic conspiracies and all that botty-dribble. I mean, there’s so much more that’s interesting and exciting in art and in history. It plays to the worst and laziest in humanity, the desire to think the worst of the past and the desire to feel superior to it in some fatuous way.”

    Paul Krugman on Ayn Rand: “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

  120. 5 mos, 2 wks ago

    This was a seriously very extremely good submit. In theory I’d prefer to publish like this also obtaining time and actual effort to make a great piece of writing but what can I say I procrastinate alot and by no indicates appear to acquire some thing carried out.

  121. 4 mos, 1 wk ago

    Aw Gendeng jeh apiks

  122. eric
    2 mos, 1 wk ago

    hey, who’s the man with the boxing gloves? excuse my ignorance.

  123. Emily Temple
    2 mos ago

    @Eric: That’s Nabokov!

  124. shayna
    1 mo, 2 wks ago

    i’m not sure if the flaubert/sand comment was derogetory, actually. they were great friends?

  125. Nah
    1 mo ago

    “What? No Dorothy Parker?”

    What about her? She was a twit, her limp, pithy limericks do more to insult her own person, inflated ego and lack of profundity more than anyone she lashed out against.

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