Scorn (17 page)

 

Writers, Publishers and Critics

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

A writer is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann

A bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
Ernest Hemingway on writers

Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.
Walter Bagehot

Thank you for the manuscript; I shall lose no time in reading it.
Benjamin Disraeli's standard reply to authors who sent him unsolicited copies of their books

Great editors do not discover nor produce great authors; great authors create and produce great publishers.
John Farrar

I object to publishers: the one service they have done me is to teach me to do without them. They combine commercial rascality with artistic touchiness and pettiness, without being either good businessmen or fine judges of literature. All that is necessary in the production of a book is an author and a bookseller, without any intermediate parasite.
George Bernard Shaw

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
Adage

When I split an infinitive, god damn it, I split it so it stays split.
Raymond Chandler, letter to his British publisher

As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers, so those with irrational fear of life become publishers.
Cyril Connolly

Every author, however modest, keeps an outrageous vanity chained like a madman within the padded cell of his breast.
Logan Pearsall Smith

Authors are easy to get on with – if you're fond of children.
Michael Joseph, publisher

A great author, notwithstanding his Dictionary is imperfect, his Rambler pompous, his learning common, his ideas vulgar, his Irene a child of mediocrity, his genius worldly, his politics narrow and his religion bigoted.
Robert Potter, a critic, on Samuel Johnson

Chuang Tzu was born in the 4th century before Christ. The publication of this book in English, two thousand years after his death, is obviously premature.
Now-forgotten critic

Plato is a bore.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The more I read him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him.
Thomas Babington Macaulay on Socrates

A crawling and disgusting parasite, a base scoundrel, and pander to unnatural passions.
William Cobbett on Virgil

Every man with a belly full of the classics is an enemy of the human race.
Henry Miller

A gentleman need not know Latin, but he should at least have forgotten it.
Brander Matthews. Attrib.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong in the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.
Stephen Leacock,
Homer and Humbug

Twitter is unspeakably irritating … It's like writing a novel without the letter ‘P'… It's the ultimate irresponsible medium.
Portentous American novelist Jonathan Franzen

Lighten up, Franzo.
India Knight, tweeting in response

Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the antichrist, but he surely looks like one of the four horsemen.
Jonathan Franzen

Google is not a synonym for research.
Dan Brown, author of
The Da Vinci Code

Calling Jeffrey Archer's fictional characters cardboard is an insult to the British packaging industry.
Peter Preston

Googling yourself is like opening the door to a room full of people telling you how shit you are.
Armando Iannucci's fictional MP Peter Mannion, in
The Thick of It

All the universities and all the old writers put together are less talented than my arsehole.
Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus, German alchemist and physician, to his critics

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.
Brendan Behan

Most critics are educated beyond their intelligence.
Critic Kenneth Tynan

The thankless task of drowning other people's kittens.
Cyril Connolly on book reviewing

I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.
Alain de Botton, to a critic who gave his book a bad review

Donkeyosities, egotistical earthworms, hogwashing hooligans, critic cads, random hacks of illiteration, talent wipers of wormy order, the gas-bag section, poking hounds, poisonous apes, maggotty numbskulls, evil-minded snapshots of spleen and, worst of all, the mushroom class of idiots.
Amanda Malvina Fitzalan Anna Margaret McLelland McKittrick Ros, an unsuccessful writer, on her critics

I am sure I have only slightly less high an opinion of Matthew's literary ability than he does himself.
Alan Lomberg, this book's editor's English teacher in Swaziland, in a school report

The little shit Parris, with his perma-smirk.
Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's former press secretary, on the editor of this book

The thinking man's Matthew Parris.
John Patten on Simon Hoggart,
Guardian
parliamentary sketchwriter

Critics! appall'd I venture on the name, Those cut-throat bandits in the path of fame.
Robert Burns

Thou eunuch of language … thou pimp of gender … murderous accoucheur of infant learning … thou pickle-herring in the puppet show of nonsense.
Robert Burns on a critic

If you imagine a Scotch commercial traveller in a Scotch commercial hotel leaning on the bar and calling the barmaid ‘Dearie' then you will know the keynote of Burns's verse.
A.E. Housman on Robert Burns

Descended from a long line of maiden aunts.
A fellow don (anon) on A.E. Housman

A louse in the locks of literature.
Tennyson on Churton Collins, a critic

The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.
Matthew Arnold

What is Conrad but the wreck of Stevenson floating about in the slipsop of Henry James?
George Moore on Joseph Conrad

… an umbrella left behind at a picnic.
George Moore on W.B. Yeats

That vague formless obscene face.
Oscar Wilde on George Moore

Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
Oscar Wilde

He hangs poised for the right word while the wheels of life go round.
Description of Henry James by his cousin

The dullest Briton of them all.
Henry James on Anthony Trollope

Trollope! Did anyone bear a name that predicted a style more Trollopy?
George Moore on Anthony Trollope

A name is just a name … Somewhere in Las Vegas there's probably a male prostitute called John Updike.
Salman Rushdie, after Updike criticised his choice of names for his characters

It's not that he ‘bites off more than he can chew' but he chews more than he bites off.
Clover Adams on Henry James

A church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every church light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an eggshell, a bit of string.
H.G. Wells on a book by Henry James

Henry James had turned his back on one of the great events in the world's history, the rise of the United States, in order to report tittle-tattle at tea parties in English country houses.
W. Somerset Maugham on Henry James

I doubt that the infant monster has any more to give.
Henry James on Rudyard Kipling

Poor Henry James! He's spending eternity walking round and round a stately park and the fence is just too high for him to
peep over and he's just too far away to hear what the countess is saying.
W. Somerset Maugham

Henry James has a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.
T.S. Eliot. Attrib.

How unpleasant it is to meet Mr Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And If and Perhaps and But.
T.S. Eliot on himself

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.
Ezra Pound on T.S. Eliot

To me Pound remains the exquisite showman minus the show.
Ben Hecht on Ezra Pound

Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
Mark Twain

A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tried out a few of the old proven ‘sure-fire' literacy skeletons with sufficient local colour to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.
William Faulkner on Mark Twain

I have discovered that our great favourite, Miss Austen, is my countryman … with whom Mama, before her marriage, was acquainted. Mama says that she was then the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers.
Mary Russell Mitford on Jane Austen, letter to a friend

I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared be an authoress.
Jane Austen on herself

I found out in the first two pages that it was a woman's writing – she supposed that in making a door, you last of all put in the panels!
Thomas Carlyle on
Adam Bede
by George Eliot

I wish her characters would talk a little less like the heroes and heroines of police reports.
George Eliot on
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë

George Eliot had the heart of Sappho; but the face, with the
long proboscis, the protruding teeth of the Apocalyptic horse, betrayed animality.
George Meredith on George Eliot

All the faults of
Jane Eyre
are magnified a thousandfold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read.
James Lorimer on
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë, in the North British Review

Oh really. What is she reading?
Dame Edith Evans to a friend who said Nancy Mitford was borrowing her villa in France to finish a book

A woman who writes a book commits two sins; she increases the number of books, and decreases the number of women.
Alphonse Karr

One of the surest signs of his genius is that women dislike his books.
George Orwell on Joseph Conrad

He would not blow his nose without moralizing on conditions in the handkerchief industry.
Cyril Connolly on George Orwell

I cannot abide Conrad's souvenir shop style and bottled ships and necklaces of romanticist clichés.
Vladimir Nabokov on Joseph Conrad

One could always baffle Conrad by saying ‘humour'. It was one of our damned English tricks he had never learned to tackle.
H.G. Wells on Joseph Conrad

Analysing humour is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.
E.B. White

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.
Oscar Wilde on Charles Dickens's
Old Curiosity Shop

Of Dickens's style it is impossible to speak praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical and created by himself in defiance of the rules. No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.
Anthony Trollope on Charles Dickens

It was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand, it is as old as the quills, although of course, one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are all galley-slaves.
Vladimir Nabokov on E.M. Forster,
The Paris Review Interviews

He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.
Virginia Woolf on E.M. Forster

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
Virginia Woolf

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.
Noël Coward on Dame Edith Sitwell

Mr Lawrence looked like a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some suburban garden … he looked as if he had just returned from spending an uncomfortable night in a very dark cave.
Dame Edith Sitwell on D.H. Lawrence

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.
D.H. Lawrence on
Ulysses
by James Joyce