Every writer is, first
and foremost, a reader. And equally with
us, ordinary bookworms, they have their literary preferences and favourite
authors, too. For example, world famous Dostoevsky admired Tolstoi, and Pushkin
worshipped Dante. However, what happens when one famous author doesn’t like the
work of the other one? By all means, this antipathy should be declared, out
loud, in a form highly sardonic and offensive.
It’s funny to read
how 2 famous writers of, let’s say, 20th century that are equally
beloved now in the 21st, are hurling juicy insults at each other, using
quite a strong language and humiliating epithets. It’s hard to comprehend, really, how anybody would
want to dig out Shakespeare’s corpse and pelt it with stones. And how that
person could be Bernard Shaw.
I offer a list of 40 roughest
author-on-author insults – juicy, hilarious to read and incredibly offensive.
40. Salman Rushdie on E. L.
James
“I've
never read anything so badly written that got published. It made 'Twilight'
look like 'War and Peace.”
39. Ayn Rand on C.S.
Lewis
“The lousy bastard
who is a pickpocket of concepts, not a thief, which is too big a word for
him…This monstrosity is not opposed to science — oh no! — not to pure science,
only to applied science, only to anything that improves man’s life on earth!”
38. Noel Coward on Oscar Wilde
“[I] am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome,
affected sod.”
37. Gertrude Stein on
Ezra Pound
“A village explainer.
Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”
36. Conrad Aiken on Ezra Pound
"For in point of style, or manner, or whatever, it is difficult to imagine anything much worse than the prose of Mr. Pound. It is ugliness and awkwardness incarnate. Did he always write so bardly?"
35. Charlotte Bronte on Jane Austen
"Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would rather have written 'Pride and Prejudice'...than any othe Waverly novels? I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses."
34. Ralph Waldo
Emerson on Jane Austen
“Miss Austen’s novels
. . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in
the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge
of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind
of the writer . . . is marriageableness.”
33. Samuel Butler on Goethe
"I have been reading a translation of Goethe's 'Wilhelm Meister'. Is it good? To me it seems perhaps the very worst book I ever read. No Englishman could have written such a book. I cannot remember a single good page or idea... Is it all a practical joke? If it really is Goethe's 'Wilhelm Meister' that I have been reading, I am glad I have never taken the trouble to learn German."
32. Wyndham Lewis on Gertrude Stein
“Gertrude
Stein's prose-song is a cold black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold
suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same
thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through and all along.”
31. Samuel Johnson on Jonathan Swift
"Swift has a higher reputation than he deserves... I doubt whether 'The Tale of a Tub' to be his; for he never owned it, and it is much above his usual manner."
30. Samuel Pepys on William Shakespeare (A
Midsummer Night's Dream)
"...we saw 'Midsummer Night's Dream', which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life."
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. 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.”
26. Gustave Flaubert
on George Sand
“A great cow full of
ink.”
25. H. G. Wells on
George Bernard Shaw
“An idiot child
screaming in a hospital.”
24. Lord Byron on John
Keats
“Here are Johnny
Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry, and three novels by God knows whom… No more Keats, I
entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is
no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.”
23. Vladimir Nabokov
on Joseph Conrad
“I cannot abide
Conrad’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of
romanticist cliches.”
22. Dylan Thomas on
Rudyard Kipling
“Mr Kipling … stands
for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.”
21. Samuel Johnson on John Milton (Paradise
Lost)
“'Paradise Lost' is one of the books which the
reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it
longer than it is.”
20. Martin Amis on
Miguel Cervantes
“Reading Don Quixote
can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior
relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and
terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at
last (on page 846 — the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you
will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You
made it, despite all that ‘Don Quixote’ could do.”
19. William Faulkner
on Ernest Hemingway
“He has never been
known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
18. Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner
“Poor Faulkner. Does
he really think big emotions come from big words?”
17. Gore Vidal on
Truman Capote
“He’s a full-fledged
housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”
16. Truman Capote on
Jack Kerouac
“That’s not writing,
that’s typing.”
15. Oscar Wilde on
Alexander Pope
“There are two ways
of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”
14. Vladimir Nabokov
on Ernest Hemingway
“As to Hemingway, I
read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls
and bulls, and loathed it.”
13. Henry James on
Edgar Allan Poe
“An enthusiasm for
Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”
12. Elizabeth Bishop
on J.D. Salinger
“I HATED [Catcher in
the Rye]. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and
blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How
can they let him do it?”
11. D.H. Lawrence
on Herman Melville
“Nobody can be more
clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville,
even in a great book like ‘Moby Dick’….One wearies of the grand serieux.
There’s something false about it. And that’s Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn
ass brays! brays! brays!”
10. 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.”
9. Evelyn Waugh
on Marcel Proust
“I am reading Proust
for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”
8. Mark Twain
on Jane Austen
“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.”
7. William Faulkner
on Mark Twain
“A hack writer who
would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of
the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to
intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”
6. D.H. Lawrence on
James Joyce
“My God, what a
clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of
quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate,
journalistic dirty-mindedness.”
5. Robert Louis
Stevenson on Walt Whitman
“…like a large shaggy
dog just unchained scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.”
4. Henry James on Edgar
Allan Poe
“An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly
primitive stage of reflection.”
3. Anatole France on Emile Zola
“His work
is evil, and he is one of those unhappy beings of whom one can say that it
would be better had he never been born.”
2. Mary McCarthy on J.D.Salinger
"I don't like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn't a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don't like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality and it's so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemes so false, so calculated. Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egotism. I simply can't stand it."
1. Virginia Woolf on
James Joyce
“[Ulysses is] the
work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
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