“Rat-eyed” Virginia Woolf described Somerset Maugham as.

“No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word,” said Eudora Welty of William Faulkner.

“Curiously dull, furiously commonplace, and often meaningless,” Alfred Kazin said of William Faulkner.

“Hemingway never climbed out on a limb and never used a word where the reader might check his usage by a dictionary,” William Faulkner said of Ernest Hemingway.

In response to which Hemingway:

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

“Dostoievsky’s profound, criminal, saintly face,” observed Thomas Mann, nicely.

“He wore a gray suit, black shoes, white shirt, tie and vest. His appearance never changed. He came down in the morning in his suit, and he would still be wearing it the last thing at night,” said John Huston of John Paul Sartre.

“Reedy and kind,” Truman Capote once described Albert Camus as.

“As a writer, he chews more than he bites off,” said Whistler of Henry James.

“An illiterate, underbred book,” Virginia Woolf called James Joyce’s Ulysses — which, however, she and her husband Leonard published nonetheless.

“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing,” said Oscar Wilde.

“An enormous dungheap,” Voltaire described the entire body of Shakespeare’s work as. And went on to call Shakespeare “An amiable barbarian.”

“You have written a good book,” Victor Hugo told Gustav Flaubert in a letter, regarding Madame Bovary.

“House of the Dead is Dostoievsky’s best book,” said Tolstoy.

“That’s not writing — it’s typing,” Truman Capote said of Kerouac’s On the Road.

“I find it impossible to take him seriously as a major writer and have never ceased to be amazed at the number of people who can,” said Edmund Wilson of Franz Kafka.

“A cursed, conceited, wily heathen,” said Martin Luther of Aristotle.

“He was a bum poet, of course, being a bum person,” Robert Graves said of D.H. Lawrence.

“I don’t understand them. To me, that’s not literature,” Cormac McCarthy said of Henry James and Marcel Proust.

“Like many of us he was rather disgusting, with his deliberate dirtiness, his myopia, his smell, his undying enmity for unfavorable reviewers, his stinginess, his coy greed for titles, money, and gowns, his contempt for Cockneys and Americans, sallow, greasy, handsome …” said the poet Karl Shapiro of the poet Lord Alfred Tennyson.

“A damned good poet and a fair critic; but he can kiss my ass as a man,” Ernest Hemingway said of T.S. Eliot.






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