Literary Insults

It's no-holds-barred bare knuckle action in the literary world;

• I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me - Charles Darwin
• Edgar Allan Poe's prose is unreadable - like Jane Austen's. No, there is a difference. I could read his prose on a salary, but not Jane's - Mark Twain
• Ulysses is the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples - Virginia Woolf
• Henry James has a mind so fine that no idea could violate it - T S Elliot
• Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms - G K Chesterton
• It was a bad play saved by a bad performance - George S Kaufman
• Gertrude Stein was a past master in making nothing happen very slowly - Clifton Fadiman
• Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art - Gore Vidal
• J D Salinger is the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school - Norman Mailer
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the US - Gore Vidal
• The g is silent - the only thing about her that is - Julia Burchill on Camille Paglia