How to Throw Literary Shade
“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” -Oscar Wilde on Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop
“Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.” -Gore Vidal on Truman Capote
“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.” -Lord Byron on John Keats
“There are a lot of daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they’re all dead now.” -Mark Twain on James Fenimore Cooper
“A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.” -Gertrude Stein on Ezra Pound
“I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff.” -Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust
“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.” - Martin Amis about Miguel Cervantes
“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.” - Virginia Woolf about James Joyce
“Personally I would rather have written Winnie-the-Pooh than the collected works of Brecht.” - Tom Stoppard about Bertolt Brecht
“I can’t read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up.” - James Gould Cozzens on John Steinbeck
“As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.” -Vladimir Nabokov on Ernest Hemingway
“Concerning no subject would he be deterred by the minor accident of complete ignorance from penning a definitive opinion.” -Roger Scruton on George Bernard Shaw
“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.” -Anatole France on Emile Zola
“I grow bored in France – and the main reason is that everybody here resembles Voltaire…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
“He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the US.” -Gore Vidal on Alexander Solzhenitsyn
“It took me years to ascertain that Henry James’s work was giving me little pleasure….In each case I asked myself: ‘What the dickens is this novel about, and where does it think it’s going to?’ Question unanswerable!” -Arnold Bennett on Henry James
“…like a large shaggy dog just unchained scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.” -Robert Lewis Stevenson on Walt Whitman
“There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.” -Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope
“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
“His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.” -Edmund Wilson on Evelyn Waugh
“He could not blow his nose without moralising on the state of the handkerchief industry.” -Cyril Connolly on George Orwell
“To say that Agatha Christie’s characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.” -Ruth Rendell on Agatha Christie
“A sort of gutless Kipling.” -George Orwell on W.H. Auden
“A lewd vegetarian.” -Charles Kingsley on Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Crude, immoral, vulgar and senseless.” -Leo Tolstoy on William Shakespeare
“He has plenty of music in him, but he cannot get it out.” -Alfred, Lord Tennyson on Robert Browning
“Henry James has a mind - a sensibility -so fine that no mere idea could ever penetrate it.” -T.S. Eliot on Henry James
“I invariably miss most of the lines in the last act of an Ibsen play; I always have my fingers in my ears, waiting for the loud report that means that the heroine has just Passed On.” -Dorothy Parker on Henrik Ibsen
“The language of Aristophanes reeks of his miserable quackery: it is made up of the lowest and most miserable puns; he doesn’t even please the people, and to men of judgement and honour he is intolerable; his arrogance is insufferable, and all honest men detest his malice.” -Plutarch on Aristophanes
“Books seem to me to be pestilent things, and infect all that trade in them… with something very perverse and brutal.” -John Locke on booksellers
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