Some fun.
Thanks for the chuckles! #4 was my favorite!
Best line Truman Capote ever wrote.
bfl
A good description of most of them. The envy just drips from these quotes. Even the ones I agree with. :)
I guess this is why Disraeli said, “Whenever I want to read a good novel, I write one”.
Capote`s insult of Kerouac is the only thing of his I`ve ever read that I found interesting. [And I`m a big Kerouac fan.] Yet my favorite author-on-author attacks are by Tom Wolfe—he demolished Mailer, Updike and John Irving in a great article once, and made Margaret Atwood look like the dithering liberal fool she is on TV once.
Ping.
I’m surprised these two didn’t make the list:
McCarthy on Lilian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”
Christopher Buckley on Tom Clancy: ‘’the James Fenimore Cooper of his day, which is to say, the most successful bad writer of his generation.’’ (This was followed by a war by faxes between the two.)
It’s hard to believe that H.L. Mencken doesn’t make the list; he reviewed scores of books in the early-to-mid twentieth century and had an acerbic wit.
I don’t recall who said it or of whom it was spoken (could it have been Henry James?), but “The only problem with his novels is there is too much real estate between the covers.”
ping and bump for later
C S Lewis said the F word???
Gore Vidal on local favorite Ayn Rand: “This odd little woman is attempting to give a moral sanction to greed and self interest, and to pull it off she must at times indulge in purest Orwellian newspeak of the “freedom is slavery” sort.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/gore-vidal-archive/comment-0761#ixzz1QbcaQePS
30. Gustave Flaubert on George Sand
“A great cow full of ink.”
On Wiki
Other writers of the period, however, differed in their assessment. Flaubert, by no means an indulgent or forbearing critic, was an unabashed admirer, as was Marcel Proust.
In summary:
Writers are smug and hate each other.
"No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly; and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind."-- Cervantes