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, crit
ics 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 …
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