With the single exception of Homer, there is no
eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so
entirely as I despise Shakespeare, when I measure my mind against
his.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize
the quotations.
OSCAR WILDE
Hamlet is a coarse and barbarous play . . .
One might think the work is a product of a drunken savage’s
imagination.
VOLTAIRE
Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors—no
wonder he is crazy.
H. L. MENCKEN
Are the commentators on Hamlet really mad, or
only pretending to be?
OSCAR WILDE
He had one of the more wicked minds ever going.
TRUMAN CAPOTE on Mark Twain
One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell by Dickens without laughing. OSCAR WILDE
He festooned the dung heap on which he had placed
himself with sonnets as people grow honeysuckle around outdoor
privies.
QUENTIN CRISP on Oscar Wilde
You have to be over thirty to enjoy Proust.
GORE VIDAL
He became mellow before he became ripe.
ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT on Christopher Morley
Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a
painful duty.
OSCAR WILDE
If it must be Thomas, let it be Mann, and if it must
be Wolfe let it be Nero, but never let it be Thomas Wolfe.
PETER DE VRIES
Odets, where is thy sting?
GEORGE S. KAUFMAN
He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination
usually makes for great popularity in the U.S.
GORE VIDAL on Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Capote should be heard, not read.
GORE VIDAL
Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor
art.
GORE VIDAL
That’s not writing, that’s typing.
TRUMAN CAPOTE on Jack Kerouac
He’s a second-rate Stephen Birmingham. And Stephen
Birmingham is third-rate.
TRUMAN CAPOTE on Louis Auchincloss
The House Beautiful is the play lousy.
DOROTHY PARKER
Perfectly Scandalous was one of those plays in
which all of the actors unfortunately enunciated very
clearly.
ROBERT BENCHLEY
Number Seven opened last night. It was
misnamed by five.
ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT
There’s less here than meets the eye.
TALLULAH BANKHEAD on a Maeterlinck play
Ouch!
WOLCOTT GIBBS reviewing Wham!
I didn’t like the play, but then I saw it under
adverse conditions—the curtain was up.
GEORGE S. KAUFMAN
When I saw Annie (at a date’s insistence) I
had to hit myself on the head afterward with a small hammer to get
that stupid “Tomorrow” song out of my head.
IAN SHOALES
If you will only take the precaution to go in long
enough after it commences and to come out long enough before it is
over, you will not find it wearisome.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW reviewing Gounod’s Redemption
Tonstant Weader fwowed up.
DOROTHY PARKER reviewing The House at Pooh Corner
The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith
will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all
history.
DOROTHY PARKER reviewing The Autobiography of Margot
Asquith
Anybody who doesn’t like this book is healthy.
GROUCHO MARX on Oscar Levant’s The Memoirs of an
Amnesiac
Very nice, but there are dull stretches.
COMTE DE RIVAROL on a two-line poem
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It
should be thrown with great force.
DOROTHY PARKER
I fell asleep reading a dull book, and I dreamed that
I was reading on, so I awoke from sheer boredom.
HEINRICH HEINE
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