Verbal Zingers: Great Writers Insult Each Other

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they who are tops in turning good phrases sometimes use verbal zingers as rapiers to insult their kind.  unkind, they may be, but they're fun to read.  besides, as will rogers had said, everything is funny, as long as it is happening to someone else.

from Flavorwire Cultural News and Critique, the following is the countdown of 30 harshest insults from famous writers to other famous writers:

30. Gustave Flaubert on George Sand

“A great cow full of ink.”


Gustave Flaubert        George Sand


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.”

             
Robert Louis Stevenson    Walt Whitman


28. Friedrich Nietzsche on Dante Alighieri

“A hyena that wrote poetry on tombs.”


Friedrich Nietzsche    Dante Alighieri

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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.”


Harold Bloom         J.K. Rowling


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 â€" all this is difficult to admire.”


Vladimir Nabokov    Fyodor Dostoevsky


25. Gertrude Stein on Ezra Pound

“A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”

       
Gertrude Stein   Ezra Pound

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24. Virginia Woolf on Aldous Huxley

“All raw, uncooked, protesting.”


Virginia Woolf         Aldous Huxley


23. H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw

“An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”


H.G. Wells          George Bernard Shaw 
     

22. Joseph Conrad on D.H. Lawrence

“Filth. Nothing but obscenities.”

   
Joseph Conrad   D.H. Lawrence

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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.”


Lord Byron             John Keats


20. Vladimir Nabokov on Joseph Conrad

“I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches.”


Vladimir Nabokov    Joseph Conrad


19. Dylan Thomas on Rudyard Kipling

“Mr Kipling … stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.”


Dylan Thomas               Rudyard Kipling

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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.”

        
Ralph Waldo Emerson    Jane Austen


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 â€" 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.”


Martin Amis                  Miguel Cervantes


16. Charles Baudelaire on Voltaire (1864)

“I grow bored in France â€" 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.”

 
Charles Baudelaire      Voltaire

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15. William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

   
William Faulkner   Ernest Hemingway


14. Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

 
Ernest Hemingway   William Faulkner


13. Gore Vidal on Truman Capote

“He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”

 
Gore Vidal                   Truman Capote 

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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                Alexander Pope


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.”

 
Vladimir Nabokov     Ernest Hemingway


10. Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe (1876)

“An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”

 
Henry James         Edgar Allan Poe

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9. Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac

“That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

 
Truman Capote        Jack Kerouac


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?”

           
Elizabeth Bishop     J.D. Salinger


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!”

         
D.H. Lawrence     Herman Melville

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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.”

 
W. H. Auden       Robert Browning


5. Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust (1948)

“I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”


Evelyn Waugh         Marcel Proust


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.”

 
Mark Twain               Jane Austen

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3. Virginia Woolf on James Joyce

“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”


Virginia Woolf         James Joyce


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.”

     
William Faulkner     Mark Twain


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.”

       
D.H. Lawrence   James Joyce

-list of insults from http://www.flavorwire.com/
-images from various sources

[hubag bohol]

Robert Graves on Dylan Thomas: 

"A Welsh demagogic masturbator who failed to pay his bills."


     
Robert Graves          Dylan Thomas