1. Friedrich Nietzsche on Dante Alighieri:
“A hyena that wrote poetry on tombs.”
2. 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.”
3. 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.”
4. Charles Baudelaire on Voltaire
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.
5. William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway
“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
6. Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
7. Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe
“An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”
8. Mark Twain on Jane Austen
“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.”
9. Virginia Woolf on James Joyce
“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
10. William Faulkner on Mark Twain
“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.”
BONUS: H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw
“An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”
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