Proust: mentally defective (according to Mr.Waugh)
And now, on with the jollity.
26. Marcel Proust, according to Evelyn Waugh (1948)
I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.
27. William Faulkner, according to Ernest Hemingway
Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You're thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes -- and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he's had his first one.
28. E.M. Forster's Howards End, according to Katherine Mansfield (1915)
Putting my weakest books to the wall last night I came across a copy of 'Howards End' and had a look into it. Not good enough. E.M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He's a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain't going to be no tea.
And I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella.
29. Voltaire, according to Charles Baudelaire (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.
30. Charles Dickens, according to George Meredith
Not much of Dickens will live, because it has so little correspondence to life...If his novels are read at all in the future, people will wonder what we saw in them, save some possible element of fun meaningless to them.
31. Jane Austen, according to Mark Twain (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.
32. Gustave Flaubert, according to George Moore (1888)
Flaubert bores me. What nonsense has been talked about him!
33. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, according to Gore Vidal (1980)
He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the US.
Solzhenitsyn: "a bad novelist and a fool'
34. Ernest Hemingway, according to Tom Wolfe
Take Hemingway. People always think that the reason he's easy to read is that he is concise. He isn't. I hate conciseness -- it's too difficult. The reason Hemingway is easy to read is that he repeats himself all the time, using 'and' for padding.
35. James Joyce's Ulysses, according to Virginia Woolf (1922)
I dislike 'Ulysses' more and more -- that is I think it more and more unimportant; and don't even trouble conscientiously to make out its meanings. Thank God, I need not write about it.
36. William Shakespeare, according to George Bernard Shaw (1896)
With the exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him, knowing as I do how incapable he and his worshippers are of understanding any less obvious form of indignity.
37. Charles Lamb, according to Thomas Carlyle
Charles Lamb I sincerely believe to be in some considerable degree insane. A more pitiful, rickety, gasping, staggering, stammering tomfool I do not know. He is witty by denying truisms and abjuring good manners. His speech wriggles hither and thither with an incessant painful fluctuation; not an opinion in it or a fact or even a phrase that you can thank him for....
38. Edith Sitwell, according to Dylan Thomas (1934)
Isn't she a poisonous thing of a woman, lying, concealing, flipping, plagiarising, misquoting, and being as clever a crooked literary publicist as ever.
39. James Jones, according to Ernest Hemingway (1951)
To me he is an enormously skillful f#*&-up and his book will do great damage to our country. Probably I should re-read it again to give you a truer answer. But I do not have to eat an entire bowl of scabs to know they are scabs...I hope he kills himself....
40. Sir Walter Scott, according to Mark Twain (1883)
Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks...progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the silliness and emptiness, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote.
41. Jane Austen, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1861)
I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world.
42. Robert Frost, according to James Dickey (1981)
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-worshipping adenoidal little twerp of a student-poet to hang on his every word I never saw.
43. Tom Wolfe, according to John Irving (1999)
He doesn't know how to write fiction, he can't create a character, he can't create a situation...You see people reading him on airplanes, the same people who are reading John Grisham, for Christ's sake....I'm using the argument against him that he can't write, that his sentences are bad, that it makes you wince. It's like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine....You know, if you were a good skater, could you watch someone just fall down all the time? Could you do that? I can't do that.
Bret Harte: liar, thief, swindler, snob
44. Bret Harte, according to Mark Twain (1878)
Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward, a Jeremy Diddler, he is brim full of treachery, and he conceals his Jewish birth as carefully as if he considered it a disgrace. How do I know? By the best of all evidence, personal observation.
45. Thomas Carlyle, according to Anthony Trollope (1850)
I have read -- nay, I have bought! -- Carlyle's 'Latter Day Pamphlets,' and look on my eight shillings as very much thrown away. To me it appears that the grain of sense is so smothered up in a sack of the sheerest trash, that the former is valueless....I look on him as a man who was always in danger of going mad in literature and who has now done so.
46. Henry James, according to Arnold Bennett
It took me years to ascertain that Henry James's work was giving me little pleasure....In each case I asked myself: 'What the dickens is this novel about, and where does it think it's going to?' Question unanswerable! I gave up. Today I have no recollection whatever of any characters or any events in either novel.
47. James Fenimore Cooper, according to Mark Twain (1895)
Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in 'Deerslayer,' and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.
48. Gore Vidal, according to Martin Amis (1995)
Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice -- registry offices, 'Romeo and Juliet,' the disposable diaper -- is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda.
49. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, according to Edward Fitzgerald (1861)
She and her sex had better mind the kitchen and her children; and perhaps the poor; except in such things as little novels, they only devote themselves to what men do much better, leaving that which men do worse or not at all.
I did say at the start of this unending Marah that these snippets of snarkiness weren't necessarily in order. I have, however, saved my absolute favorite for the end:
50. Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, according to Norman Mailer (1998)
The book has gas and runs out of gas, fills up again, goes dry. It is a 742-page work that reads as if it is fifteen hundred pages long....
At certain points, reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred pound woman. Once she gets on top, it's over. Fall in love, or be asphyxiated. So you read and you grab and you even find delight in some of these mounds of material. Yet all the while you resist -- how you resist! -- letting three hundred pounds take you over.
Now, that's a non-clichéd review for you.
Book Review Bingo: More book review cliche fun that you can shake a riveting, unputdownable stick at
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How to learn to love Ulysses for anti-Joyce-ites
30 famous authors whose works were rejected (repeatedly, and sometimes rudely) by publishers
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A lament for the death of literary humor
Confession time: books I should love...but, for some reason, I hate
Top 10 books people lie about reading
The top 20 most annoying book reviewer cliches and how to use them all in one meaningless review
10 best audiobook productions ( so good, they make the print versions seem almost boring)
Men are from Dune, women are from Pemberley? Leaping recklessly into the literary gender gap
Lizzie Skurnick's Shelf Discovery and confessions of a nerdy and ungirly girlhood
An unprivileged reader reviews The Privileges by Jonathan Dee
Reality -- it's what's for dinner: a review of Reality Hunger by David Shields
Good-bye to Fifth Avenue; Or, duck, folks! Here comes literary diversity -- finally
The Sensitive Inspector Syndrome -- the scourge of the modern British mystery novel
Comments
"At certain points, reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred pound woman"
That is proubally the best ownage I ever heard. I'm gonna steal some of these lines for my reviews. Thanks!
If you read the Mark Twain quote about Jane Austen (#31), you'll notice it says "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice . . ." if he hates her so much, why does he keep reading her books?
Apparently Mr. Twain had a lot more to say about Jane Austen. He also said, "To me his (Edgar Allan Poe's) prose is unreadable — like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death." Ouch!
This was a great list, I laughed out loud several times while reading it. Besides Twain my favorite quote was Katherine Mansfield bashing Howards End. Too funny.
My favorite came from writer Dorothy Parker, who reviewed books under the byline Constant Reader, in response to A.A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner:
"Tonstant Weader fwowed up."
I always liked Norman Mailer's take on J.D. Salinger: "The greatest mind ever to stay in Prep School."
Another great one--H.G. Wells on Henry James: "His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle . . .It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den." I always liked that image.
You should look for Stephen King bashing Stephenie Meyer :P
Forster's novel is actually titled "Howards End."
@Griff: Yeesh, don't I look like a dope. Thanks.
@Karenlibrarian Maybe he kept trying to read it, trying to figure out what everyone thought was so amazing about it? Maybe he's like me - i've read the Twilight series half a dozen times now, even though i detest it, figuring i've missed something that everyone else sees, even though it's all just drivel. Ugh.
Twain's bitchslapping of Cooper should be the top of any list such as this. It's a blueprint for the genre, and Twain takes the Deerslayer series apart as fully and completely as as a forensics team looking at a plane crash, and does so viciously as possible.
China Mieville has said of Tolkien "He is a wen (boil) on the ass of fantasy literature."
I rather like that one.
And Mailer would know. This from NYT mag (3/29/10): "When Norris discovered the scope of Mailer’s infidelities, she was struck by how many of the women were either his age — he was near 70 then — or significantly overweight. “He made the remark, ‘Sometimes I want to be the attractive one.’"
Twain wrote some disparaging comments about Austin in his letters to William Dean Howells. As Howells was a fan of Austin, some of what Twain writes can be considered him simply trying to rile up his friend.
My favorite has always been Thomas Gray talking about fellow poet Christopher Smart.
"He walked as if he had fouled his small clothes and looks as if he smelt it."
Kate, you beat me to it.
Also from Dorothy Parker - "She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B"
Kate, you beat me to it.
Also from Dorothy Parker - "She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B"
WHAT ABOUT: Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, that's typing."
After reading Kerouac's 'On the Road', Truman Capote quipped: "That's not writing - it's typing."
Sorry shoulda refreshed the page before posting.
Thank you, those who did, for validating my opinion of Hemingway. So overrated. As for anything John Irving has to say about a writer, if he's against I'm even more in favor. I've forced myself through a couple of Irving's books, including Garp, and at the end wanted that part of my life back.
Twain's full essay on "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" is well worth reading.
http <colon><slash><slash> to.pbs.org <slash> jfcooper
I've always hated Dickens. No matter how many teachers told me he was a genius, and no matter how many textbooks used his work as an example of good writing, I've always felt that his melodramatic and unbelievable plots, his one-dimensional characters and his literary cliches were not justifiable as writing.
I was hoping, after having read Parts 1 and 2 of this "article", that Michelle Kerns might have done Gary Dexter the courtesy of conceding that all of these quotes were lifted from his book, Poisoned Pens: Literary Invective from Amis to Zola.
I believe Dorothy Parker's criticism was toward actress Katherine Hepburn.
As far as author zings, actor/author Stephen Fry on "The DaVinci Code": Complete loose stool water. Arse gravy of the very worst kind.
Sorry, Matt, but I've been compiling these nifty little quotes for over a year now. I wanted to write this article a long time ago but I didn't have enough quotes to do it with. I'm a lazy sort of person and didn't feel like dredging up every author's yammerings all at one go. Time -- and the Internet -- are wonderful things, aren't they? But you are right about Mr. Dexter's book, Poisoned Pens. It is quite funny.
Re: #36
There are some of us Shakespeare fans who think the same about Mr. Shaw’s sophomoric shallow-brained attempts at humor. I think it may be a Red Sox vs. Yankees sort of thing.
Regarding #30 -- G. Meredith's prediction that Dickens would be forgotten -- Meredith apparently did not forsee the advent of public education (which,I think it was Milton who described it as "asinine feast of bramble and cow-thistle" -- or something like that.)
I refer you to Tom Wolfe's essay entitled "My Three Stooges", which is a far more devestating treatment of Mailer's, Irving's, and Updike's reaction to "Man in Full", than anything they ever thought to write about him.
#39. Interesting Hemingway says such--His words there are also a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy of his own.
Ben Jonson on Shakespeare:
"I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, 'Would he had blotted a thousand."
one must remember - all of these "put downs" are one person's opinion ---
"WHAT ABOUT: Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, that's typing."
Actually, it was Gore Vidal who said of Jacqueline Susann: "She doesn't write, she types."
One has to wonder if Susann outsold Vidal in her day.
The wrongest one is from Gore Vidal on John Updike. If there's one writer whose prose Updike's doesn't resemble, it's Lawrence. As M. Amis notes above, Vidal seems to think that anyone genuinely enthusiastic about heterosexual sex is a liar or worse, therefore a faux-Lawrence.
Nope, I don't care where Michelle got these quotes from. They're funny. And everyone has a right to their opinion and every writer has them. If I want to fall asleep in seconds I read Hemingway or Dickens. In fact, I tried reading James Lasdun's 'Seven Lies' last week. It began as a promising story only to bore me because it was 110 pages of NOT MUCH of anything but a dysfunctional childhood. Snorefest. I took it back to the library unfinished.
Well, Harold Bloom tries to bash everyone who is popular than him and that includes the magnificient Stephen King. Thank God, when he criticized King in a harsh way in the vein like he criticised Rowling, some modern critics' backleash was very acid.
Mailer's review was good, but Katherine Mansfield's review was my absolute favorite XD
Gore Vidal is a writer that I like, but his egoism is so transparent that it's silly sometimes. I don't really think he dislikes any of the writers he's dissed; he just felt like saying something snarky.
Did I miss something, or did Hemingway just call William Faulkner a drunk? I think he was projecting there...if any author was drinking on the job, it'd be him (and maybe Fitzgerald).
The comment that made me most outraged was the first one. Evelyn Waugh is at least as well known for his pretentious snobbism as for his prose, and by calling Proust's writing "very poor stuff" without offering any reason, he gives a damning glimpse into how superficial his mind really was <.<
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