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

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.

[...] The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History → 19 June 2011 | Permalink [...]

Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman:

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

Mary McCarthy on James Jones:

“Death is his business.”

H.G. Wells on Henry James:

“A hippopotams trying to pick up a pea.”

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

[...] Lês fierder by Flavorwire [...]

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.”

Homer J. Simpson on Walt Whitman

“Leaves of grass my ass”

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.

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

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

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.

[...] Si mai sunt multe alte asemenea perle. Le gasiti pe toate aici. [...]

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.”

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

Maybe he thought everybody typed.

[...] preferidos por escritores bebuns, trazendo como tira-gosto suas frases sobre o tema, e outra de declarações insultuosas feitas por escritores sobre colegas, como esta de Evelyn Waugh sobre Marcel Proust: “Acho que ele [...]

How is Harlan Ellison not on this list?

[...] The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History « Flavorwire [...]

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

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

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!

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”.

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

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”

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 ;)

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.

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

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…

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

David Foster Wallace vs. Bret Easton Ellis: http://biblioklept.org/2011/06/14/is-american-psycho-profound-artistic-nihilism-or-stupid-shallow-nihilism-bret-easton-ellis-vs-david-foster-wallace/

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.”

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

“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.

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.”

@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.

What a fun article! I loved those quotes!

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

[...] Flavorwire » The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History. [...]

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.

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.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson, on Matthew Arnold

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

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?

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

[...] Tea x Time List: The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History. [...]

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.

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.

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.

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?

What? No Dorothy Parker?

[...] From Flavorwire, via Shelf Awareness, the “30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults in History.” [...]

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!!!!!

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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)

You should add the comment JRR Tolkien states about Tarzan.

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…

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

[...] get away from the jealousies and trash talk, Turchi recommends focusing on a work’s intentions first and then taking the foray into [...]

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.”

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.

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.”

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 !

Mark Twain on James Fenimore Cooper:

Eschew surplusage.

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

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

*Hint: The answer is “no”.*

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

[...] release, Behaving Badly, we are cross-posting this recent recap from our friends at Flavorwire, The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History. Talk about some bad behavior! “My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but [...]

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

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.

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

[...] http://flavorwire.com/188138/the-30-harshest-author-on-author-insults-in-history [...]

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,’

[...] more reason to look at something funny online! Want to see famous writers insult each other? Look here and say it with me: Ooh! And [...]

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)

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

[...] http://flavorwire.com/188138/the-30-harshest-author-on-author-insults-in-history [...]

[...] Check out this post: http://flavorwire.com/188138/the-30-harshest-author-on-author-insults-in-history [...]

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

[...] recently compiled a list of “The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults in History,” and not one insult is for the faint of heart.  Take a look: Lord Byron on John [...]

[...] fun post from Flavorwire.  What’s your favorite author-on-author [...]

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

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.

[...] Ouch, that hurts: 30 of the nastiest author-on-author insults [...]

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.

[...] Would you like to read more?  I direct you to the site and the post: Flavorwire on Author’s Insults. [...]

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

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

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

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

Mark Twain discussing Henry James:

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

[...] Of course the harshest remarks are probably left anonymously on Amazon.com Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?” [...]

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

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

[...] fine folks over at Flavorwire have compiled a list of 30 particularly nasty comments authors have made about each other [...]

[...] seems like so much stale, shallow, cold, pompous, dry, boring drivel. Or, as Mark Twain put it (on this site dedicated to author-on-author tongue-lashings): “I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I [...]

[...] good day also to share Woolf on Joyce: “[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.” 0 I like This [...]

[...] Authors can be hard on one another.  Friedrich Nietzsche on Dante: “A hyena that wrote on tombs.” H.G. Wells on Henry James: “A hippopotams trying to pick up a pea.”  Homer J. Simpson on Walt Whitman: “Leaves of grass my ass.”  Flavorpill offers 30 author-on-author insults here. [...]

[...] The Thirty Harshest Author-on-Author Insults in History. (Flavorwire) [...]

[...] Ever wonder about whether or not great authors got along or whether they were like a bunch of sorority girls? Well Flavorwire has a list of the thirty biggest literary brawls. [...]

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

[...] de insultos e provocações entre escritores renomados, publicada essa semana pelo site Flavorwire (leia em português, pela revista [...]

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

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.”

[...] Flavorwire – The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In [...]

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.

[...] How authors have insulted each other through the ages. (via Wyrdsmiths) [...]

[...] In case you missed this as it made the rounds on Facebook last week: Treat yourself to the mean-spirited pleasure of reading the 30 harshest author-on-author quotes in history. [...]

[...] awesome insults are excerpted from The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History by Flavorwire.  It’s amusing, sometimes scary, proof that people weren’t always so [...]

[...] – Flavorwire has listed The 30 harshest Author-on-Author insults in history [...]

[...] site Flavorwire listou 30 provocações públicas entre grandes escritores. Confira a seguir alguns dos [...]

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.’”

[...] The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History [...]

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

[...] more under the writing and authorship theme, over at Flavorwire, Emily Temple has rounded up the 30 harshest author-on-author insults. Nobody knows how to open up a can of verbal whoop-ass like a professional wordsmith. Image via [...]

[...] hoped that when we listed our picks for the harshest author-on-author insults in history, you readers would have some of your own favorite barbs and witticisms to suggest. And [...]

“..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

[...] author insults were borrowed from flavorwire. HT to Andrew Sullivan The pictures are from The Library of Congress 25. Gertrude Stein on Ezra [...]

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

@Fretrix2SQ:

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

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.”

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

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.”

[...] ~ Flavorwire: The 30 harshest author-on-author insults in history [...]

[...] chi volesse leggerseli tutti direttamente in inglese, QUESTO è il link alla pagina di [...]

[...] sopporto”), be’ siete capitati nel posto giusto. Oggi, infatti, vogliamo proporvi una carrellata di insulti; ma non una carrellata di insulti qualsiasi, s’intende, bensì una rassegna [...]

[...] Flavorwire: The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults in History. I think my favorite has to be Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope: “There are two ways of disliking [...]

[...] reactions to her work. So, I’m not surprised by the slam that Mark Twain delivers in this list of the 30 Harshest Author on Author Insults in [...]

[...] A list of 30 harsh insults. [...]

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

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…

All of these are pretty dull, even the Wilde.

This article has been Ideamarked!

[...] on author violence courtesy of Flavorwire: Charles Baudelaire on Voltaire (1864)“I grow bored in France — and the main reason is that [...]

[...] to the rest at Flavorwire Tweet/Email/Share This [...]

[...] The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults in History: Faulkner, Emerson and Capote insult Twain, Austen and Kerouac. [...]

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

[...] semana, o site Flavorwire compilou 30 das mais engraçadas provocações públicas da história literária do Ocidente, [...]

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

[...] The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History from FlavorWrite by Emily Temple (Another fine submission from Brett) [...]

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.

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.

Who the hell is Harold Bloom?

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!”

[...] recent post The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History is a must-read for those who geek out on literature-related stuff. Some of my favorite authorial [...]

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.”

[...] *Writer insults: “Ulysses is the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.” That’s quite vivid. [...]

[...] Hear This this week  we had  3o Top Author to Author Insults as judged by  online site  Flavorwire.  Some were witty and others just plain nasty and  it seems that the Pen can indeed be mightier [...]

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.”

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?

[...] have compiled a list of the ’30 harshest author-on-author insults in history’ which will entertain you during your tea break. Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac: “That’s not [...]

[...] Flavorwire gave us The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults in History. It might be worth your time to go check them all out, but I had to share with you a few of my [...]

[...] http://flavorwire.com/188138/the-30-harshest-author-on-author-insults-in-history [...]

[...] The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults in History – obviously I’m not alone in finding intelligent people bagging on each other totally hilarious. Also – how hot was the young Martin Amis? [...]

[...] The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History: An example – H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw “An idiot child screaming in a hospital.” [...]

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

[...] semana, o site Flavorwire compilou 30 das mais engraçadas provocações públicas da história literária do Ocidente, [...]

[...] Eine schöne Sache, die ich mal wieder bei BoingBoing gefunden habe: Die 30 schönsten Beleidigungen von Autor zu Autor. [...]

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.

[...] had to laugh yesterday. I followed a link on Twitter and came across this list of writerly insults. Then later, a search for the BBC’s Big Read list of the nation’s 100 favourite books led [...]

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

[...] NVWN web page:  http://schlowlibrary.org/nvwn > Nittany Valley Writers Network NVWN Yahoo group:  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nvwn/  (see Links and Files) NVWN Facebook page:  http://www.facebook.com/nvwritersnetwork This Month’s Recommendations: Endless fun:  http://tvtropes.org (e.g., see Troperville, Tools, and Toys; http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ElNinoIsSpanishForTheNino , http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnimalTalk) http://flavorwire.com/188138/the-30-harshest-author-on-author-insults-in-history [...]

“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.

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.”

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.

And Latin Writers?? Where are they???

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

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

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

Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal. – Leo Tolstoy

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.

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

http://truthandgrace.com/twainbom.htm

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

[...] recent author-on-author, filmmaker-on-filmmaker and musician-on-musician insults have proved that creative folk are only [...]

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.”

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.

[...] got to love a great literary feud — check out some of the choice words dished out by literature’s brightest and [...]

[...] semana, o site Flavorwire compilou 30 das mais engraçadas provocações públicas da história literária do Ocidente, [...]

[...] Until a couple of years ago I had never shown my fiction to anyone. Business writing, sure —somehow that has different DNA. But my fiction—the stuff that almost springs from my subconscious—that’s like stepping out into the world of dating, putting your heart on the line and hoping someone doesn’t come along and squish it like a little bug. So when the time came for me to hand my words over and let someone else ‘judge’ them, my heart just about leapt from my body. Thankfully the eyes that read my baby were kind and supportive, unlike those of the authors quoted in this Flavorwire blog entitled The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History. [...]

Aw Gendeng jeh apiks

[...] Read more harsh insults authors threw at each other here.   [...]

[...] mix of brittle ego and verbal skill, are the great artists of the insult (just compare this compilation of sly, concise author-on-author rudeness with a considerably less enjoyable collection of director-on-director savagings). Even if you adore [...]

[...] followed up their popular lists of author-on-author and filmmaker-on-filmmaker insults with a look at music feuds. Like this Elton John zinger about [...]

[...] followed up their popular lists of author-on-author and filmmaker-on-filmmaker insults with a look at music feuds. Like this Elton John zinger about [...]

[...] [sort of] with the writing theme, Flavorwire did a post recently on the 30 harshest author-on-author insults in history.  I wonder if any of the authors feel any remorse for committing such insults to paper for ever. [...]

[...] I do feel compelled to share this: The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults in History. [...]

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

[...] this summer, a shocking number of our readers flocked to read (and amend) our list of the harshest author-on-author insults in history. But you know who is even more childish, trifling, vindictive, and nasty than your favorite [...]

@Eric: That’s Nabokov!

[...] This post was originally published August 15, 2011.] Our recent, wildly successful posts about author-on-author insults and filmmaker-on-filmmaker insults got us thinking about similar cattiness in the music industry, [...]

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

[...] “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.” — Harold Bloom (and others) brings the snark. [...]

“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.

[...] Flavorwire compilou 30 das mais engraçadas provocações públicas da história literária do Ocidente, [...]

read the pinned castle.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Pinned-Castle-ebook/dp/B006WEP17K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328418926&sr=8-1

Really? No Hemingway on Fitzgerald?

[...] I’ll admit it. I’m somewhat of a literary geek. And, since I also like a clever, derogatory turn of phrase as much as the next critic, I couldn’t resist posting a link to this nice list I’ve recently come across: The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History . [...]

[...] I’m not one to give legal advice. Could that be any more spectacular? You should take extreme action with pick up woman [...]

Mhm, amazing layout :).

[...] has a post up about the 30 harshest author on author insults in history. It was originally published in 2011 and in January Flavorwire republished it. Sigh. [...]

My favorite insult was not mentioned Mark Twain vs. Edgar Allan Poe. “To me, his prose is unreadable– like Jane Austen’s”

[...] way to work with great places to pick up girls. You probably want to know if it’s time to overhaul your great places to pick up girls. I do need my name to be tied to great places to pick [...]

If I missed it in the long thread above, I apologize.

John Dryden on Thomas Shadwell in “Mac Flecknoe” – “Trust nature, do not labor to be dull.”

[...] as vicious as what the Brideshead Revisited author had to say about Marcel Proust in our roundup of the harshest author-on-author insults in history? Before you decide, head over to Letters of Note to read the full text of his letter, including the [...]

I don’t remember who originally said it, but in “The Dyer’s Hand” Auden quotes someone who said, “Journalists are writers, who, given time, will write worse.”

Of course Bloom is not really an author, just a bitter man

Meh, is that the best they could do? Well, okay, the hippo trying to pick up a pea is good.

And Bronte can just leave Austen alone: Jane Eyre is something I admired when I was 17 and have thought the most horrific tripe ever since. The more I learn about human nature, however, the more Jane seems to be filled with pure genius.

The ten best would probably be some of Voltaire’s… he was a genius also for that exercice. Remember the verses about the snake ? or the mockery about Rousseau ?

First of all, never take to heart anything said by a female writer, for they are all fairly awful. Virginia Woolfe was typical of a woman by saying extremely nasty things about people far superior to her in craft to gain attention. Insulting Ullyses? Which easily ranks in the top five on almost any scholars book shelf? Moron. I have one of her books, a flowery thing that is meaningless snark.

As far as Faulkner insulting Hemingway, and all the other back and forth, I guess ego has a way of obstructing the plain truth that you’re not the only genius around, and that voices are supposed to be different.

Hello! Really great post.

[...] The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History [...]

[...] taken from articles posted by  *The Huffington Post and **Favorwire about authors and critical reviews. No related posts. Filed Under: Miscellaneous, Opinion Tagged [...]