Writers, Publishers and Critics

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

A writer is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann

A bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
Ernest Hemingway on writers

Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.
Walter Bagehot

Thank you for the manuscript; I shall lose no time in reading it.
Benjamin Disraeli’s standard reply to authors who sent him unsolicited copies of their books

Great editors do not discover nor produce great authors; great authors create and produce great publishers.
John Farrar

I object to publishers: the one service they have done me is to teach me to do without them. They combine commercial rascality with artistic touchiness and pettiness, without being either good businessmen or fine judges of literature. All that is necessary in the production of a book is an author and a bookseller, without any intermediate parasite.
George Bernard Shaw

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
Adage

When I split an infinitive, god damn it, I split it so it stays split.
Raymond Chandler, letter to his British publisher

As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers, so those with irrational fear of life become publishers.
Cyril Connolly

Every author, however modest, keeps an outrageous vanity chained like a madman within the padded cell of his breast.
Logan Pearsall Smith

Authors are easy to get on with – if you’re fond of children.
Michael Joseph, publisher

A great author, notwithstanding his Dictionary is imperfect, his Rambler pompous, his learning common, his ideas vulgar, his Irene a child of mediocrity, his genius worldly, his politics narrow and his religion bigoted.
Robert Potter, a critic, on Samuel Johnson

Chuang Tzu was born in the 4th century before Christ. The publication of this book in English, two thousand years after his death, is obviously premature.
Now-forgotten critic

Plato is a bore.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The more I read him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him.
Thomas Babington Macaulay on Socrates

A crawling and disgusting parasite, a base scoundrel, and pander to unnatural passions.
William Cobbett on Virgil

Every man with a belly full of the classics is an enemy of the human race.
Henry Miller

A gentleman need not know Latin, but he should at least have forgotten it.
Brander Matthews. Attrib.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong in the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.
Stephen Leacock, Homer and Humbug

Twitter is unspeakably irritating … It’s like writing a novel without the letter ‘P’… It’s the ultimate irresponsible medium.
Portentous American novelist Jonathan Franzen

Lighten up, Franzo.
India Knight, tweeting in response

Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the antichrist, but he surely looks like one of the four horsemen.
Jonathan Franzen

Google is not a synonym for research.
Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code

Calling Jeffrey Archer’s fictional characters cardboard is an insult to the British packaging industry.
Peter Preston

Googling yourself is like opening the door to a room full of people telling you how shit you are.
Armando Iannucci’s fictional MP Peter Mannion, in The Thick of It

All the universities and all the old writers put together are less talented than my arsehole.
Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus, German alchemist and physician, to his critics

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.
Brendan Behan

Most critics are educated beyond their intelligence.
Critic Kenneth Tynan

The thankless task of drowning other people’s kittens.
Cyril Connolly on book reviewing

I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.
Alain de Botton, to a critic who gave his book a bad review

Donkeyosities, egotistical earthworms, hogwashing hooligans, critic cads, random hacks of illiteration, talent wipers of wormy order, the gas-bag section, poking hounds, poisonous apes, maggotty numbskulls, evil-minded snapshots of spleen and, worst of all, the mushroom class of idiots.
Amanda Malvina Fitzalan Anna Margaret McLelland McKittrick Ros, an unsuccessful writer, on her critics

I am sure I have only slightly less high an opinion of Matthew’s literary ability than he does himself.
Alan Lomberg, this book’s editor’s English teacher in Swaziland, in a school report

The little shit Parris, with his perma-smirk.
Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former press secretary, on the editor of this book

The thinking man’s Matthew Parris.
John Patten on Simon Hoggart, Guardian parliamentary sketchwriter

Critics! appall’d I venture on the name, Those cut-throat bandits in the path of fame.
Robert Burns

Thou eunuch of language … thou pimp of gender … murderous accoucheur of infant learning … thou pickle-herring in the puppet show of nonsense.
Robert Burns on a critic

If you imagine a Scotch commercial traveller in a Scotch commercial hotel leaning on the bar and calling the barmaid ‘Dearie’ then you will know the keynote of Burns’s verse.
A.E. Housman on Robert Burns

Descended from a long line of maiden aunts.
A fellow don (anon) on A.E. Housman

A louse in the locks of literature.
Tennyson on Churton Collins, a critic

The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.
Matthew Arnold

What is Conrad but the wreck of Stevenson floating about in the slipsop of Henry James?
George Moore on Joseph Conrad

… an umbrella left behind at a picnic.
George Moore on W.B. Yeats

That vague formless obscene face.
Oscar Wilde on George Moore

Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
Oscar Wilde

He hangs poised for the right word while the wheels of life go round.
Description of Henry James by his cousin

The dullest Briton of them all.
Henry James on Anthony Trollope

Trollope! Did anyone bear a name that predicted a style more Trollopy?
George Moore on Anthony Trollope

A name is just a name … Somewhere in Las Vegas there’s probably a male prostitute called John Updike.
Salman Rushdie, after Updike criticised his choice of names for his characters

It’s not that he ‘bites off more than he can chew’ but he chews more than he bites off.
Clover Adams on Henry James

A church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every church light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an eggshell, a bit of string.
H.G. Wells on a book by Henry James

Henry James had turned his back on one of the great events in the world’s history, the rise of the United States, in order to report tittle-tattle at tea parties in English country houses.
W. Somerset Maugham on Henry James

I doubt that the infant monster has any more to give.
Henry James on Rudyard Kipling

Poor Henry James! He’s spending eternity walking round and round a stately park and the fence is just too high for him to peep over and he’s just too far away to hear what the countess is saying.
W. Somerset Maugham

Henry James has a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.
T.S. Eliot. Attrib.

How unpleasant it is to meet Mr Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And If and Perhaps and But.
T.S. Eliot on himself

Mr Eliot is at times an excellent poet and has arrived at the supreme Eminence among English critics largely through disguising himself as a corpse.
Ezra Pound on T.S. Eliot

To me Pound remains the exquisite showman minus the show.
Ben Hecht on Ezra Pound

Jane Austen’s books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.
Mark Twain

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

I have discovered that our great favourite, Miss Austen, is my countryman … with whom Mama, before her marriage, was acquainted. Mama says that she was then the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers.
Mary Russell Mitford on Jane Austen, letter to a friend

I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared be an authoress.
Jane Austen on herself

I found out in the first two pages that it was a woman’s writing – she supposed that in making a door, you last of all put in the panels!
Thomas Carlyle on Adam Bede by George Eliot

I wish her characters would talk a little less like the heroes and heroines of police reports.
George Eliot on Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

George Eliot had the heart of Sappho; but the face, with the long proboscis, the protruding teeth of the Apocalyptic horse, betrayed animality.
George Meredith on George Eliot

All the faults of Jane Eyre are magnified a thousandfold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read.
James Lorimer on Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, in the North British Review

Oh really. What is she reading?
Dame Edith Evans to a friend who said Nancy Mitford was borrowing her villa in France to finish a book

A woman who writes a book commits two sins; she increases the number of books, and decreases the number of women.
Alphonse Karr

One of the surest signs of his genius is that women dislike his books.
George Orwell on Joseph Conrad

He would not blow his nose without moralizing on conditions in the handkerchief industry.
Cyril Connolly on George Orwell

I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and necklaces of romanticist clichés.
Vladimir Nabokov on Joseph Conrad

One could always baffle Conrad by saying ‘humour’. It was one of our damned English tricks he had never learned to tackle.
H.G. Wells on Joseph Conrad

Analysing humour is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.
E.B. White

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.
Oscar Wilde on Charles Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop

Of Dickens’s style it is impossible to speak praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical and created by himself in defiance of the rules. No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.
Anthony Trollope on Charles Dickens

It was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand, it is as old as the quills, although of course, one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are all galley-slaves.
Vladimir Nabokov on E.M. Forster, The Paris Review Interviews

He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.
Virginia Woolf on E.M. Forster

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
Virginia Woolf

I am fairly unrepentant about her poetry. I really think that three quarters of it is gibberish. However, I must crush down these thoughts, otherwise the dove of peace will shit on me.
Noël Coward on Dame Edith Sitwell

Mr Lawrence looked like a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some suburban garden … he looked as if he had just returned from spending an uncomfortable night in a very dark cave.
Dame Edith Sitwell on D.H. Lawrence

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 Ulysses by James Joyce

The work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
Virginia Woolf on Ulysses by James Joyce

She has been a peculiar kind of snob without really belonging to a social group with whom to be snobbish.
Edmund Wilson on Virginia Woolf

We have met too late. You are too old for me to have any effect on you.
James Joyce on meeting W.B. Yeats

Wanting to meet an author because you like his books is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.
Margaret Atwood

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. How fucking difficult is that? It’s the sentence that bestrides the fucking book I reviewed for you. It is the sentence I wrote first in my fucking review. It is 35 fucking letters long, which is why I wrote that it was. And so some useless cunt sub-editor decides to change it to ‘jumps over a lazy dog’. Can you fucking count? Can you see that that makes it a 33 letter sentence? So it looks as if I can’t count, and the cunting author of the book, poor Mr Dunn, cannot count. The whole bastard book turns on the sentence being as I wrote it, and that is exactly 35 letters long. Why do you meddle? What do you think you achieve with that kind of dumb-witted smart arsery? Why do you change things you do not understand without consulting? Why do you believe you know best when you know fuck all, jack shit? That is as bad as editing can be. Fuck. I hope you’re proud. It will be small relief for the author that nobody reads your poxy magazine. Never ever ask me to write something for you. And don’t pay me. I’d rather take 400 quid for assassinating a crack whore’s only child in a revenge killing for a busted drug deal – my integrity would be less compromised. Jesus fucking wept. I don’t know what else to say.
British columnist Giles Coren in a memo to the editor of his paper’s review-and-listings section when he noticed that a word had been changed in his review of a novel by Mark Dunn

The number one book of the ages was written by a committee, and it was called The Bible.
Louis B. Mayer, to a writer who complained of excessive editing

Why don’t you write books people can read?
Mrs Nora Joyce to her husband, James

An essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognised.
Tom Stoppard on James Joyce

He had a genius for backing into the limelight.
Lowell Thomas, biographer of T.E. Lawrence

They are rather out of touch with reality; by reality I mean shops like Selfridges, and motor buses, and the Daily Express.
T.E. Lawrence on expatriate authors living in Paris

A bore and a bounder and a prig. He was intoxicated with his own youth, and loathed any milieu which he couldn’t dominate. Certainly he had none of a gentleman’s instincts, strutting about Peace Conferences in Arab dress.
Sir Henry Channon on T.E. Lawrence

A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow.
J.B. Priestley

At the age of 50 Priestley will be saying, why don’t the highbrows admire me? It isn’t true that I only write for money. He will be enormously rich; but there will be that thorn in his shoe – or so I hope.
Virginia Woolf on J.B. Priestley

It seems that Dr Leavis gave a lecture at Nottingham University on ‘Literature in My Time’ and declared that apart from D.H. Lawrence there had been no literature in his time. He knocked hell out of everybody, and no doubt had all the Lucky Jims rolling down the aisles. Like Groucho Marx on another academic occasion, whatever it was he was against it. Virginia Woolf was a ‘slender talent’; Lytton Strachey ‘irresponsible and unscrupulous’; W.H. Auden ‘the career type’, fixed at ‘the undergraduate stage’; Spender ‘no talent whatsoever’; Day-Lewis ‘Book Society author’; the whole age ‘dismal’, and outlook ‘very poor’. By the time Dr Leavis caught his train back to Cambridge, there was hardly anything left to read in Nottingham. I have not the pleasure of the doctor’s acquaintance – he was up at Cambridge just after me – but I have a vague but impressive vision of him, pale and glittering-eyed, shining with integrity, marching out of Downing to close whole departments of libraries, to snatch books out of people’s hands, to proclaim the bitter truth that nobody writes anything worth reading. There is Lawrence; there is Leavis on Lawrence; perhaps a disciple, Jones, is writing something – let us say, Jones on Leavis on Lawrence, after that, nothing.
J.B. Priestley on F.R. Leavis

He is important not because he leads to Mr J.B. Priestley but because he leads to Jane Austen, to appreciate whose distinction is to feel that life isn’t long enough to permit of one’s giving much time to Fielding or any to Mr Priestley.
F.R. Leavis on Fielding

It is sad to see Milton’s great lines bobbing up and down in the sandy desert of Dr Leavis’s mind with the grace of a fleet of weary camels.
Edith Sitwell on F.R. Leavis, Aspects of Modern Poetry

Then Edith Sitwell appeared, her nose longer than an anteater’s, and read some of her absurd stuff.
Lytton Strachey, An evening at Arnold Bennett’s House

I do not want Miss Mannin’s feelings to be hurt by the fact that I have never heard of her. At the moment I am debarred from the pleasures of putting her in her place by the fact she has not got one.
Edith Sitwell on Ethel Mannin

So you’ve been reviewing Edith Sitwell’s last piece of virgin dung, have you? Isn’t she a poisonous thing of a woman, lying concealing, flipping, plagiarizing, misquoting, and being as clever a crooked literacy publicist as ever.
Dylan Thomas on Edith Sitwell

He was a detestable man. Men pressed money on him, and women their bodies. Dylan took both with equal contempt. His great pleasure was to humiliate people.
A.J.P. Taylor on Dylan Thomas

Somebody’s boring me. I think it’s me.
Dylan Thomas after talking continuously for some time

You have but two topics, yourself and me, and I’m sick of both.
Samuel Johnson on James Boswell

E.M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.
Katherine Mansfield on E.M. Forster

I loathe you. You revolt me stewing in your consumption.
D.H. Lawrence to Katherine Mansfield

Good reviews make your heart swell. Bad reviews are like seeing your daughter heckled during the Nativity play.
Mark Haddon

Like a piece of litmus paper he has always been quick to take the colour of the times.
The Observer on Aldous Huxley

You could tell by his conversation which volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica he’d been reading. One day it would be Alps, Andes and Apennines, and the next it would be the Himalayas and the Hippocratic Oath.
Bertrand Russell on Aldous Huxley

The stupid person’s idea of a clever person.
Elizabeth Bowen writing in the Spectator, on Aldous Huxley

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
Samuel Johnson to an author

I hate a fellow whom pride, or cowardice, or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl; let him come out as I do, and bark.
Samuel Johnson

There is no arguing with Johnson; for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.
Oliver Goldsmith on Samuel Johnson

Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulseless lot that make up England. They’ve got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it’s a marvel they can breed. Why, why, why, was I born an Englishman!
D.H. Lawrence after a publisher rejected his manuscript of Sons and Lovers

I like to write when I feel spiteful: it’s like having a good sneeze.
D.H. Lawrence, review of Art-Nonsense by Eric Gill, in the Phoenix

He’s impossible. He’s pathetic and preposterous. He writes like a sick man.
Gertrude Stein on D.H. Lawrence

I am only one, only one, only one. Only one being, one at the same time. Not two, not three, only one. Only one life to live, only sixty minutes in one hour. Only one pair of eyes. Only one brain. Only one being. Being only one, having only one pair of eyes, having only one time, having only one life, I cannot read your MS three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.
A.J. Fifield, rejecting a manuscript by Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein’s prose 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 heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through, and all along.
Percy Wyndham Lewis

… a flabby lemon and pink giant, who hung his mouth open as though he were an animal at the zoo inviting buns – especially when the ladies were present.
Wyndham Lewis on Ford Madox Ford

I do not think I have ever seen a nastier-looking man … Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.
Ernest Hemingway on Percy Wyndham Lewis

He has never been known to use a word that might send a man to a dictionary.
William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think emotions come from big words?
Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner

If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come.
Raymond Chandler

Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?
William, Duke of Gloucester, later George III, to Edward Gibbon

Gibbon’s style is detestable; but it is not the worst thing about him.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Edward Gibbon

Gibbon is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow, and poisons our literary club for me. I class him among infidel wasps and enormous snakes.
James Boswell on Edward Gibbon

That he was a coxcomb and a bore, weak, vain, pushing, curious, garrulous, was obvious to all who were acquainted with him. That he could not reason, that he had no wit, no humour, no eloquence, is apparent from his writings. Nature had made him a slave and an idolater. His mind resembled those creepers which the botanists call parasites and which can subsist only by clinging round the stems and imbibing the juices of stronger plants.

Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a tablebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London … Everything which another man would have hidden, everything the publication of which would have made another man hang himself, was a matter of exaltation to his weak and diseased mind.
Thomas Babington Macaulay on James Boswell

I wish I was as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything.
Lord Melbourne on Thomas Babington Macaulay

You know, when I am gone you will be sorry you never heard me speak.
Sydney Smith to Thomas Babington Macaulay, a non-stop talker

CONCERNED LADY: Oo poor ’ickle fing, did oo hurt oo’s ’ickle finger then?
MACAULAY, AGED 4: Thank you, Madam, but the agony has somewhat abated.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, quoted in Wanda Orton’s biography

Rogers is not very well …. Don’t you know he has produced a couplet? When he is delivered of a couplet, with infinite labour and pain, he takes to his bed, has straw laid down, the knocker tied up, expects his friends to call and make enquiries, and the answer at the door invariably is ‘Mr Rogers and his little couplet are as well as can be expected.’ When he produces an Alexandrine he keeps to his bed a day longer.
Sydney Smith on Samuel Rogers

Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else’s dirty water.
Alexander Woollcott on Marcel Proust. Attrib.

The majority of husbands remind me of an orang-utan trying to play the violin.
Honoré de Balzac

A fat little flabby person with the face of a baker, the clothes of a cobbler, the size of a barrelmaker, the manners of a stocking salesman and the dress of an innkeeper.
Victor de Balabin on Honoré de Balzac, Diary

Everywhere I go I’m asked if university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.
Flannery O’Connor

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Dorothy Parker on Benito Mussolini’s L’Amante del Cardinale, Claudia Particella

‘That’s a very good idea, Piglet,’ said Pooh. ‘We’ll practise it now as we go along. But it’s no good going home to practise it, because it’s a special Outdoor Song Which Has To Be Sung In The Snow.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Piglet anxiously.

‘Well, you’ll see, Piglet, when you listen. Because this is how it begins. The more it Snows-tiddely-pom-’

‘Tiddely what?’ said Piglet. (He took, as you might say, the words out of your correspondent’s mouth.)

‘Pom!’ said Pooh. ‘I put it in to make it hummy.’

And it is that word ‘hummy’, my darlings, that marks the first place in ‘The House at Pooh Corner’ at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.
Dorothy Parker on The house at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne, Constant Reader review in the New Yorker

Oh for the hour of Herod.
Anthony Hope Hawkins on Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

Nothing but a pack of lies.
Damon Runyon on Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.
Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman. Hellman responded with a $2.25 million lawsuit

From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.
Grouch Marx on Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge by Sidney J. Perelman

To see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sèvres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.
Evelyn Waugh on Sir Stephen Spender

Mr Waugh, I always feel, is an antique in search of a period, a snob in search of a class, perhaps even a mystic in search of a beatific vision.
Malcolm Muggeridge on Evelyn Waugh

Insects sting, not from malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics – they desire our blood, not our pain.
Friedrich Nietzsche

In the ‘About the Author’ note … we are told ‘Roy Blount, Jr is a novelist. Now.’ This makes sense only if the errant ‘w’ at the end of the last word is omitted. Apart from this bit of inadvertent humour, First Hubby is flawlessly lame.
L.S. Klepp on First Hubby by Roy Blount, Jr, in Entertainment Weekly

The covers of this book are too far apart.
Ambrose Bierce, review

Book reviewers can be divided into batchers (who review several books at a time), betchers (‘betcher I could have written it better’), bitchers, botchers and butchers.
Paul Jennings

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what he feels about dogs.
Christopher Hampton

They point to an elephant and say that ‘that is a terrible rhinoceros’.
Ford Madox Ford on literary critics

Like a person who has put on full armour and attacked a hot fudge Sunday.
Kurt Vonnegut on critics who rage against novels

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.
W. Somerset Maugham

The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.
Alberto Moravia

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Samuel Johnson, recalling the advice of a college tutor

A vain, silly transparent coxcomb without either solid talents or a solid nature.
J.G. Lockhart on Samuel Pepys

It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg to remark on the utter lack of decorum of any kind in his dreadful little volume. Howl is meant to be a noun, but I can’t help taking it as an imperative.
John Hollander on Howl by Allen Ginsberg, in the Partisan Review

The face to launch a thousand dredgers.
Jack de Manio on Glenda Jackson in Women in Love

That face that lunched a thousand shits.
Anonymous, of the conviviality of the (Greek-born) Arianna Stassinopoulos (now Huffington)

So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
Alan Bennett on Arianna Stassinopoulos, in the Observer

Reading is a pernicious habit. It destroys all originality of sentiment.
Thomas Hobbes

That’s not writing, it’s typing.
Truman Capote on James A. Michener

You can type this shit, George, but you can’t say it.
Harrison Ford to George Lucas after reading the script for Star Wars

Having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the doorbell while in the middle of making love.
Noël Coward

Beckett was early commandeered by Enthusiasts whose object is always to quarantine their heroes. Under their influence, critics dwindle into a priesthood, readers vanish into a congregation, and art freezes into a sacrament that can never be questioned.
Robert Robinson on Samuel Beckett’s enthusiasts

I love it when you talk like that. It reminds me of how much we lost when the grammar schools went comprehensive.
Ann Leslie on Robert Robinson, who had been talking for some time

Sir Walter Scott, when all is said and done, is an inspired butler.
William Hazlitt

He could not think up to the height of his own towering style.
G.K. Chesterton on Tennyson

Hardy became a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot.
G.K. Chesterton on Thomas Hardy

Chesterton is like a vile scum on a pond … All his slop – it is really modern Catholicism to a great extent, the never taking a hedge straight, the mumbo-jumbo of superstition dodging behind clumsy fun and paradox … I believe he creates a milieu in which art is impossible. He and his kind.
Ezra Pound on G.K. Chesterton

Where were you fellows when the paper was blank?
Fred Allen to editors who heavily edited one of his scripts

February 1755
My Lord
I have been lately informed by the proprietor of The World that two papers in which my dictionary is recommended to the Public were written by your Lordship. To be so distinguished is an honour which, being very little accustomed to favours from the Great, I know not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge.

When upon some slight encouragement I first visited your Lordship I was overpowered like the rest of Mankind by the enchantment of your address, and could not forbear to wish that I might boast myself Le Vainqueur du Vainqueur de la Terre, that I might obtain that regard for which I saw the world contending, but I found my attendance so little encouraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had once addressed your Lordship in public, I had exhausted all the art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly Scholar can possess. I had done all that I could, and no Man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little. Seven years, My Lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward Rooms or was repulsed from your Door, during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of Publication without one Act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a Patron before …

Is not a Patron, My Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a Man struggling for Life in the water and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my Labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it was delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it, till I am solitary and cannot impart it, till I am known and do not want it.

I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligation where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the Public should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.

Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any Favourer of Learning I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less, for I have been long wakened from that Dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much exaltation, My lord, Your Lordship’s Most humble Obedient Servant, Sam: Johnson
Samuel Johnson to Lord Chesterfield

PATRON: n.s. One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.
Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language

Very nice, though there are dull stretches.
Antoine de Rivarol on a two-line poem

Chaucer, notwithstanding the praises bestowed upon him, I think obscene and contemptible; he owes his celebrity merely to his antiquity.
Lord Byron on Geoffrey Chaucer. Attrib.

A hyena that wrote poetry in tombs.
Friedrich Nietzsche on Dante

A Methodist parson in Bedlam.
Horace Walpole on Dante

Dr Donne’s verses are like the Peace of God, for they pass all understanding.
James I on John Donne

His verse … is the beads without the string.
Gerard Manley Hopkins on Robert Browning

He has plenty of music in him, but he cannot get it out.
Lord Tennyson on Robert Browning

Our language sunk under him.
Joseph Addison on John Milton

Thomas Gray walks as if he had fouled his small-clothes and looks as if he smelt it.
Christopher Smart

There are two ways of disliking poetry. One is to dislike it. The other is to read Pope.
Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope

In science you want to say something nobody ever knew before, in words everyone can understand. In poetry, you are bound to say something everyone knows already in words that nobody can understand.
Mathematician Paul Dirac

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.
Adrian Mitchell

The truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry.
Overheard in a Washington DC bar by author Michael Lewis

My favourite poem is the one that starts ‘Thirty days hath September’ because it actually tells you something.
Groucho Marx

Great Wits are sure to Madness near alli’d
And thin Partitions do their Bounds divide …
John Dryden on the Earl of Shaftesbury, Absalom and Achitophel

His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.
Thomas Babington Macaulay on John Dryden

Who is this Pope I hear so much about? I cannot discover what is his merit. Why will my subjects not write in prose?
George II on Alexander Pope

Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike;
Alike reserved to blame, or to commend,
A tim’rous foe, and a suspicious friend …
Alexander Pope on Joseph Addison, Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot

Steele might become a reasonably good writer if he would pay a little attention to grammar, learn something about the propriety and disposition of words and incidentally, get some information on the subject he intends to handle.
Jonathan Swift on Richard Steele

A monster, gibbering shrieks and gnashing imprecations against mankind – tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of manliness and shame: filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene.
William Thackeray on Jonathan Swift

Thackeray settled like a meat-fly on whatever one had got for dinner; and made one sick of it.
John Ruskin on William Thackeray

Here are Jonny 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.
Lord Byron on John Keats

A mere sodomite and a perfect leper.
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Algernon Swinburne

Such writing is a sort of mental masturbation … a bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium.
Lord Byron on John Keats, letter to John Murray

The world is rid of Lord Byron, but the deadly slime of his touch still remains.
John Constable (the artist) on news of Byron’s death

A tadpole of the Lakes.
Lord Byron on John Keats

A denaturalized being who, having exhausted every species of sensual gratification, and drained the cup of sin to its bitterest dregs, is resolved to show that he is no longer human, even in his frailties, but a cool, unconcerned fiend.
John Styles on Lord Byron

Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
Lady Caroline Lamb on Lord Byron

A man must serve his time to every trade
Save censure – critics all are ready made.
Lord Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers

Byron! – he would be all forgotten today if he had lived to be a florid old gentleman with iron-grey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to The Times about the Repeal of the Corn Laws.
Max Beerbohm on Lord Byron

Here is Miss Seward with six tomes of the most disgusting trash, sailing over Styx with a Foolscap over her periwig as complacent as can be – Of all Bitches dead or alive a scribbling woman is the most canine.
Lord Byron on Anna Seward

A system in which the two greatest commandments were to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour’s wife.
Thomas Babington Macaulay on Byron’s poetry

Shelley is a poor creature, who has said or done nothing worth a serious man being at the trouble of remembering … Poor soul, he has always seemed to me an extremely weak creature; a poor, thin, spasmodic, hectic, shrill and pallid being … The very voice of him, shrill, shrieky, to my ear has too much of the ghost.
Thomas Carlyle on Percy Bysshe Shelley

The same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in its own grease.
Henry James on Thomas Carlyle

A lewd vegetarian.
Charles Kingsley on Percy Bysshe Shelley

Walt Whitman is as unacquainted with art as a hog with mathematics.
London Critic on Walt Whitman

Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.
Van Wyck Brooks on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A bell with a wooden tongue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson on William Wordsworth

Two voices there are: one is of the deep;
It learns the storm-cloud’s thunderous melody …
And one is of an old half-witted sheep
Which bleats articulate monotony …
And, Wordsworth, both are thine.
James Kenneth Stephen on William Wordsworth

Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he never was a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already put there.
Oscar Wilde on William Wordsworth

Dark, limber verses stuft with lakeside sedges,
And propt with rotten stakes from rotten hedges.
Walter Savage Landor on William Wordsworth

Never did I see such apparatus got ready for thinking, and so little thought. He mounts scaffolding, pulleys, and tackle, gathers all the tools in the neighbourhood with labour, with noise, demonstration, precept, abuse, and sets – three bricks.
Thomas Carlyle on Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Carlyle is a poet to whom nature has denied the faculty of verse.
Alfred Lord Tennyson on Thomas Carlyle, letter to W.E. Gladstone

A dirty man with opium-glazed eyes and rat-taily hair.
Lady Frederick Cavendish on Alfred Lord Tennyson

Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.
Clive James on Barbara Cartland

English Literature’s performing flea.
Seán O’Casey on P.G. Wodehouse

Reading him is like wading through glue.
Alfred Lord Tennyson on Ben Jonson

There was little about melancholia that he didn’t know; there was little else that he did.
W.H. Auden on Alfred Lord Tennyson

A fly would break its legs walking across his face.
Anonymous on W.H. Auden

My face looks like a wedding cake that has been left out in the rain.
W.H. Auden on himself

The higher water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

He is all ice and wooden-faced acrobatics.
Wyndham Lewis on W.H. Auden

He is all blood, dirt and sucked sugar stick.
W.B. Yeats on Wilfred Owen

By appointment: Teddy Bear to the Nation.
Alan Bell on John Betjeman, in The Times

All right, then, I’ll say it: Dante makes me sick.
Félix Lope de Vego y Carpio after being told he was about to die

Cusk herself seems extraordinary – a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish … acres of poetic whimsy and vague literary blah, a needy, neurotic mandolin solo of reflections on child sacrifice and asides about drains.
Camilla Long

I know nothing of Parris’s social background … [but] whatever his social origins the general style of his letter with its illiterate, petulant, self-righteous tone, is the voice of the new, ‘classless’ Conservatism … jumping up everywhere nowadays, usually from the lower middle class. Frequently they have very unattractive moustaches.
Auberon Waugh in April 1979 on the editor of this book

One thing is certain, Parris will never be heard of again.
Frank Johnson, April 1979

Fuck off Parris, you talentless bastard.
Anonymous note found, by chance, apparently slipped quite randomly into the pages of one of the editor’s books in his bookshelves