Top 10 Best Literary Insults
"He's a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices."
"That's not writing, that's typing."
Faulkner: "[Hemingway] has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
Hemingway: "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"
"The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg."
"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."
"[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples."
"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—what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new!"
"I HATED the Salinger story. 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?"
"I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me."
Vidal: "As far as I am concerned, the only crypto Nazi I can think of is yourself."
Buckley: “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in you goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”
—Democratic National Convention, 1968
User Comments - Add a Comment
dherkes - 2008-07-16 06:17:50
I think the "fag" that they were talking about was the old expression for a cigarette butt. I really like the Buckley - Vidal exchange. Kind of adds majesty to the whole setting eh?
Ben - 2008-12-10 21:39:51
I hate Joyce. His descriptions are cute but they are the kind of thing I would enjoy in a short poem, not a bloody "novel".
anarchy17 - 2008-12-16 20:45:14
needed some winston churchill in here
kimmiechan - 2008-12-17 23:45:10
Way to zing 'em Hemingway!~
Larry Hiam - 2009-01-10 10:56:34
Didn't Virginia Woolf bust Norman Mailer for not knowing how to spell "fuck"? (The Naked and the Dead) He spelled it "fug" or they wouldn't publish it back then.
iris - 2009-02-13 18:10:09
"Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met." - William Faulkner
St. Elmo - 2009-02-15 07:22:08
Gore Vidal on Alesandr Solzhenitsn: "He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the U.S."
swedishdwarf - 2009-02-18 00:52:28
Larry Hiam: that was Dorothy Parker. "So, are you the one who can't spell 'fuck'?"
psh - 2009-04-13 11:43:18
elizabeth bishop doesn't know good literature from a hole in the ground.
Justin L - 2009-04-22 14:13:29
The Vidal/Buckley exchange is not a literary one; it is verbal. If they were discussing literature, it would probably be okay, but I believe they are discussing Vietnam. While it is an excellent exchange of insults, it does not belong on a top 10 list of literary insults, let alone at #1. Perhaps if the title of the list were "Top 10 Insults of Authors by Other Authors," it would be okay.
WWFD? - 2009-06-16 17:05:15
Although it's not necessarily regarding literature, one of my favorite insults coming from a literary figure is one from the great F. Scott Fitzgerald. While drinking at a Hollywood bar, Joan Crawford approached him to inquire about a movie he was writing for her. As she turned to leave, she said back to him "Write well, Mr. Fitzgerald, write well!" Fitzgerald turned to a fellow bar patron and dryly quipped "Bitch."
Arnett - 2009-10-10 18:57:41
WWFD?: What Crawford said was, "Write hard, Mr. Fitzgerald." Proving again she was not only arrogant but an ignoramus.
Fug - 2010-04-09 00:32:25
The use of "fug" as opposed to fuck was intentional on the part of mailer.
Larry Hiam - 2010-05-20 18:27:04
Ya. I could picture the face, but not the name and somehow came up with someone ah, rather uncontemporary to the early pub. history of NAKED and the DEAD. Lillian Hellman also popped into my weary factoid-soaked head. Thanks for the correction. I know Mailer's use was intentional, but as a compromise. No doubt SOME publisher would have went for it at a greatly reduced contract. I'm sure Ms. Sayer knew or presumed these facts; she was being snarky.
KesheR - 2008-07-11 01:12:19
Writers are so violent! They should be in jail! By the way, what do you people think about Joyce?