4.18.2012

Author-On-Author Insults

I was surfing the world wide web and stumbled across A Solitary Passion, a pretty cool blog which posted a great list of insults stated by one notable writer about another. This caught my attention because most of my friends know how much I strongly dislike anything Jane Austen, John Steinbeck or James Joyce. The insults made me laugh so I thought I'd share a few:  

Virginia Woolf on James Joyce:
“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner:
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?” 
Vladimir Nabokov on Ernest Hemingway:  
“As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.” 
James Dickey on Steinbeck:
"I can't read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up." 
Mark Twain on Jane Austen:
"Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” 
The last one is my favorite. I'm sure everyone has that one author (or handful of writers) that really annoys them. Read more insults here --  'Nastiest Literary Insults of All Time'

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