We all can appreciate a good insult now and then. Some insults are more subtle than others and some are meant to be deliberately cruel and vicious. Few are gentle and none are well-intentioned. Personally, I prefer those insults directed towards people who deserve them.
But that rarely is the case. Most insults have their origin in our less admirable character traits: jealousy, hate and sadism. Witness the insults below from famous authors towards other famous authors. It is great fun just to flip thru them!
The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History
Authors just don’t insult each other like they used to. Sure, Martin Amis raised some eyebrows when he claimed he would need brain damage to write children’s books, and recent Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan made waves when she disparaged the work that someone had plagiarized, but those kinds of accidental, lukewarm zingers are nothing when compared to the sick burns of yore. It stands to reason, of course, that writers would be able to come up with some of the best insults around, given their natural affinity for a certain turn of phrase and all. And it also makes sense that the people they would choose to unleash their verbal battle-axes upon would be each other, since watching someone doing the same thing you’re doing — only badly — is one of the most frustrating feelings we know. So we forgive our dear authors for their spite. Plus, their insults are just so fun to read.!
1. D.H. Lawrence on James Joyce (1928)
“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.”
J.Joyce 1882-1941
2. William Faulkner on Mark Twain (1922)
“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.”
Mark Twain 1835-1910
3. Virginia Woolf on James Joyce
“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
Virginia Woolf 1882-1942
4. Mark Twain on Jane Austen (1898)
“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.”
Jane Austen 1775-1817
5. Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust (1948)
“I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”
Marcel Proust 1871-1922
6. 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.”
Robert Browning 1812-1889
7. D.H. Lawrence on Herman Melville (1923)
“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!”
Herman Melville 1819-1891
8. 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?”
J.D.Salinger 1919-2010
9. Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac
“That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
Jack Kerouac 1922-1969
10. Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe (1876)
“An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”
Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849
11. Vladimir Nabokov on Ernest Hemingway (1972)
“As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”
Ernest Hemingway 1899-1961
12. Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope
“There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”
Oscar Wilde 1854-1900
13. Gore Vidal on Truman Capote
“He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”
Truman Capote (1924-1984) dancing with a friend
14. Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
W.Faulkner 1897-1962
15. William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway
“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
16. Charles Baudelaire on Voltaire (1864)
“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.”
Voltaire 1694-1778
17. 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.”
M.Cervantes 1547-1616
18. 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.”
R.W. Emerson 1803-1882
19. Dylan Thomas on Rudyard Kipling
“Mr Kipling … stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.”
R.Kipling 1865-1936
20. Vladimir Nabokov on Joseph Conrad
“I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches.”
V.Nabokov 1899-1977
21. Lord Byron on John Keats (1820)
“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.”
J.Keats 1795-1821
22. Joseph Conrad on D.H. Lawrence
“Filth. Nothing but obscenities.”
D.H.Lawrence 1885-1930
23. H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw
“An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”
G.B.Shaw 1856-1950
24. Virginia Woolf on Aldous Huxley
“All raw, uncooked, protesting.”
A.Huxley 1894-1963
25. Gertrude Stein on Ezra Pound
“A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”
E.Pound 1885-1972
26. 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.”
F.Dostoyevsky 1821-1881
27. Harold Bloom on J.K. Rowling (2000)
“How to read ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.”
Rowling (born 1965)
28. Friedrich Nietzsche on Dante Alighieri
“A hyena that wrote poetry on tombs.”
F.Nietzsche 1844-1900
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.”
W.Whitman 1819-1892
30. Gustave Flaubert on George Sand
“A great cow full of ink.”
George Sand (real name Dupin) was a woman! 1804-1876
SPRAGGETT ON CHESS
