Writers on writers (and other things)

[Mockingbird]

*spams*

I love reading the opinions of great writers on other great writers as they are so incisive...especially the insults. Some I enjoy:

The great American prose war:

Faulkner on Hemingway: "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."

Hemingway on Faulkner: "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"


Oscar Wilde on Henry James: "Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty."


Mark Twain on Jane Austen:

"Jane Austen? Why I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book."

"Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."

"To me his prose is unreadable--like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death."



Any favorite quotes by writers on other writers, writing, books, life? They don't have to be rude...but they're better if they are.


...who thought "bing" when reading the thread title?

[Bellerophon]

"He's a great writer. If I didn't think so I wouldn't have tried to kill him... I was the champ and when I read his stuff I knew he had something. So I dropped a heavy glass skylight on his head at a drinking party. But you can't kill the guy. He's not human."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, on Ernest Hemingway