Posted on 06/28/2011 12:51:29 PM PDT by Borges
Writers, by and large, are self deluding fonts whose jealousy flows like water down the Nile.
Normie - Published writer ;)
I’m surprised that Bristol Palin and Megan McCain didn’t make the list.
s/
My mistake. It’s in post 22
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2741190/posts?page=22#22
ping to clear up the C S Lewis quote?
I can believe it was Bierce. I don’t recall the target.
I beg to differ. Ever heard the expression "the shot heard 'round the world"?
I beg to differ. Ever heard the expression "the shot heard 'round the world"?
I remember that exchange well. Just having gotten out of the Army, it pushed Vidal to the top of my “most hated list”. He was replaced a few years later by John Kerry who is stll there (yes, even with the competition Obama is providing).
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.”
C’mon! Could Rowling possibly resent this?
Agree with Nabokove on “Papa”.
Faulkner on Twain: Boy,when something goes over this guy’s head it goes over HIGH. “Fourth rate in Europe”!? Damn right! That was part of the point! Twain was fourth rate in Europe and in the heads of many Europhiles in America.
Harold Bloom on Stephen King: He is a man who writes what used to be called penny dreadfuls.”
yes, I know “The Concord Hymn” well.....
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
What I meant is that Emerson was not long remembered as a major “poet” so much as Emerson the author of essays “Self-Reliance” and “The American Scholar” and “Divinity School Address” etc. Yes, a couple of Emerson’s poems are still remembered and are rightly beloved, but Emerson is not treated (by literary scholars, schools and colleges, large numbers in the public, etc.) as one of the major US poets to be studied for many many poems.
I always liked the way this line was passed around as
“He’s not a writer, he’s a typist.”
Because it allows you to hear the legendary Capote lisp in your mind’s ear.
Apologies to all for allowing someone else’s f-bomb to slip through....
Correction of wrongly attributed quote (from a reader comment on that website) which was most assuredly not C.S. Lewis.....
Here are some additional submissions from readers in the comments section:
Gore Vidal on death of Truman Capote: “A good Career move.”
H.L Mencken, regarding Gertrude Stein: “It is the great achievement of Miss Stein that she has made English easier to write and harder to read”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, on Matthew Arnold: “Poor Matt. He’s gone to heaven, no doubt, but he won’t like God.”
Henry Dyson on JRR Tolkien: “Oh no! Not another ******* elf!”
general literary insult by Ambrose Bierce for any number of authors: “The covers of this book are too far apart.”
Flannery O’Connor’s martini-dry dig at Harper Lee (”To Kill a Mockingbird”): “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.”
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,’
Used by Sir Winston Churchill in a reply to an unwelcome letter:
“
Dear Sir, I am in the smallest room of the house and your letter is before me. Very soon it will be behind me.
“
apparently this website condensed the list (without attribution) from a prior list of 50 found elsewhere:
http://www.examiner.com/book-in-national/the-50-best-author-vs-author-put-downs-of-all-time
Like putting a herd of glue sniffing feral cats in a burlap bag and smacking it with a ping-pong paddle.
Frankly, I think they missed the best one, from Alexander Pope, as a couplet in a stanza addressed to a contemporary who thought rather too highly of himself (from “To the Author of a Poem Entitled Successio”:
“Wit passed through thee no longer is the same,
As meat, digested, takes a different name”
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