Authors Hating on Other Authors

“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.” — Virginia Woolf

”[Ulysses] is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilisation; but it is a truthful one; and I should like to put a cordon around Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it; and ask them whether on reflection they could see anything amusing in all that foul mouthed, foul minded derision and obscenity.” — George Bernard Shaw

“Filth. Nothing but obscenities.” — Joseph Conrad on D.H. Lawrence

“A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.” — Gertrude Stein on Ezra Pound

“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.” — Vladimir Nabokov on Fyodor Dostoevsky

“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.” — D.H. Lawrence on James Joyce

“That's not writing, it's typing." — Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac

“A hack writer who would not have been considered a fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven 'sure-fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local colour to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.” — William Faulkner on Mark Twain

“His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle ... And all for tales of nothingness … It is leviathan retrieving pebbles. 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.” — H.G. Wells on Henry James

“…the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.” — Charles Baudelaire on Voltaire

“An idiot child screaming in the hospital." — H.G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw

“An unmanly sort of man whose love-life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.” — W.H. Auden on Edgar Allan Poe

"The awful Whitman. This post-mortem poet. This poet with the private soul leaking out of him all the time. All his privacy leaking out in a sort of dribble, oozing into the universe." — D.H. Lawrence on Walt Whitman

“Wordsworth was a tea-time bore, the great Frost of literature, the verbose, the humourless, the platitudinary reporter of Nature in her dullest moods. Open him at any page: and there lies the English language...in a large, sultry, and unhygienic box. Degutted and desouled.” — Dylan Thomas on William Wordsworth

“I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.” — Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust

“I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.” — Evelyn Waugh

“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 driveling idiotism of the Mankind.” — Lord Byron on John Jeats

"A great cow full of ink." — Gustave Flaubert on George Sand

“[There] is no eminent writer...whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare. 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.” — George Bernard Shaw on William Shakespeare

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” — William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway

“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." — Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen