Author Wars

Writers can be a competitive bunch and can say nasty things about others in their profession. A good barb needs to be pithy and clever. Here are a few of my favorites.

 

Authors Acting Badly Toward Other Authors

Jack Kerouac

Truman Capote

Writing as contact sport.

"That's not writing, that's typing."—Truman Capote to Jack Kerouac

"The world is rid of him, but the deadly slime of his touch remains."—John Constable about the death of Lord Byron

"Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'"—Mary McCarthy about Lillian Hellman

"If he really meant what he writes, he would not write at all."—Gore Vidal about Henry Miller

"I am fairly unrepentant about her poetry. I really think that three quarters of it is gibberish. However, I must crush down these thoughts, otherwise the dove of peace will shit on me."—Noel Coward about Dame Edith Sitwell

"He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it."—T. S. Eliot about Henry James

"She was a master at making nothing happen very slowly."—Clifton Fadiman about Gertrude Stein

"The stupid person's idea of the clever person."—Elizabeth Bowen about Aldous Huxley

"To those she did not like she was a stiletto made of sugar."—John Mason Brown about Dorothy Parker

"To me Pound remains the exquisite showman without the show."—Ben Hecht about Ezra Pound

"His verse is the beads without the string."—Gerard Manley Hopkins about Robert Browning

"He is mad, bad and dangerous to know."—Lady Caroline Lamb about Lord Byron

"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 about James Joyce

"He writes his plays for the ages - the ages between five and twelve."—George Nathan about George Bernard Shaw

"Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere."—Dame Edith Sitwell about Virginia Woolf

"A great zircon in the diadem of American literature."—Gore Vidal about Truman Capote

"The only genius with an IQ of 60."—Gore Vidal about Andy Warhol

"He is able to turn an unplotted, unworkable manuscript into an unplotted and unworkable manuscript with a lot of sex."—Tom Volpe about Harold Robbins

Writers say the darndest things.

I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.--Steve Martin

Writing a book is a adventure. To begin with it is a toy and amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him out to the public.--Winston Churchill

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.--T. S. Eliot

When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over a ball.--Raymond Chandler

No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.--Isaac Babel 

A tired exclamation mark is a question mark.--Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.--Stephen King

I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.--Solomon Short

In a thousand words I can have the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that?--Roy H. Williams

Success comes to a writer, as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.--P. G. Wodehouse

A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated.--Jorge Luis Borges