Ariel at BittersweetLife is collecting quotations of great authors writing about one another. He seems to think these knd of quotations would be edifying and enlightening. However, I’m not sure what it says about my own personality that I immediately thought of the first quotation in the list below, Mark Twain on Jane Austen. I think the lesson here is that great authors are often NOT authorities on the work of other authors.
Mark Twain: “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.”
William Faulkner on Mark Twain: “A hack writer who would not have been considered a fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven ‘sure-fire’ literary skeletons with sufficient local colour to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”
William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway: “He has never been known to use a word that might send a man to a dictionary.”
Ernest Hemingway, in reply: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think emotions come from big words?”
Thomas Macaulay: “From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics, compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness, a system in which the two great commandments were, to hate your neighbor and to love your neighbor’s wife.”
Anthony Trollope: “Of Dicken’s style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical and created by himself in defiance of rules … No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.”
Oscar Wilde on Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”
Oscar Wilde again: “Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.”
Oscar WIlde, once again: “There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”
Edward Gibbon on St. Augustine: “His learning is too often borrowed, his arguments too often his own.”
Robert Louis Stevenson on Matthew Arnold: “Poor Matt. He’s gone to heaven, no doubt, but he won’t like God.”
Samuel Johnson on Lord Chesterfield: “This man I thought had been a Lord among wits; but, I find, he is only a wit among Lords!”
Samuel Johnson on Thomas Gray: “Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way and that made people think him great.”
D.H. Lawrence on Walt Whitman: “This awful Whitman. This post-mortem poet. This poet with the private soul leaking out of him all the time. All his privacy leaking out in a sort of dribble, oozing into the universe.”
G.K.Chesterton: “Mr Shaw is (I suspect) the only man on earth who has never written poetry.”
T.S. Eliot on My Fair Lady: “I must say Bernard Shaw is greatly improved by music.”
Ezra Pound: “Mr Eliot is at times an excellent poet and has arrived at the supreme Eminence among English critics largely through disguising himself as a corpse.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: “Carlyle is a poet to whom nature has denied the faculty of verse.”
W.H. Auden on Alfred, Lord Tennyson: “There was little about melancholy that he didn’t know; there was little else that he did.”
W.H. Auden on Edgar Allan Poe: “An unmanly sort of man whose love-life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.”
Saki on Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Waldo is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.”
Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac: “That’s not writing; That’s typing.”
Let me note that I agree with only a handful of these insulting remarks, and I will not tell you which ones those are. So, “[d]o you have a favorite quote, from a respected author/thinker, in which he/she comments on another author?” Inquiring minds want to know.
