H.G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw: “An idiot child screaming in a hospital.” (Photo: Archive)
John Updike on Tom Wolfe: “It’s entertainment, not literature.” (Photo: Archive)
Gore Vidal on Truman Capote: “Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.” (Photo: Archive)
Tom Wolfe on Norman Mailer and John Updike: “[They’re] two old piles of bones.” (Photo: Archive)
Noel Coward on Oscar Wilde: “Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.” (Photo: Archive)
Stephen King on James Patterson: “A terrible writer but he’s very successful.” (Photo: Archive)
Toby Young on JK Rowling: “[The Harry Potter] books are a bland amalgam of more interesting work by more imaginative authors. The plots are feeble and episodic. And what little interest the characters and stories contain has long ago been eradicated by endless repetition.” (Photo: Archive)
Joseph Conrad on D.H. Lawrence: “Filth. Nothing but obscenities.” (Photo: Archive)
Mark Twain on James Fenimore Cooper: “There are a lot of daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they’re all dead now.” (Photo: Archive)
John Irving on Tom Wolfe: “It’s like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine.” (Photo: Archive)
Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe: “An enthusiasm for Poe is a mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.” (Photo: Archive)
Virginia Woolf on Henry James: “I am reading Henry James… and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.” (Photo: Archive)
D.H. Lawrence on Herman Melville: “Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste than Herman Melville.” (Photo: Archive)
Dylan Thomas on Rudyard Kipling: “Mr. Kipling stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.” (Photo: Archive)
Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” (Photo: Archive)
William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway: “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” (Photo: Archive)
Gertrude Stein on Ezra Pound: “A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.” (Photo: Archive)
Norman Mailer on Tom Wolfe: “There is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York.” (Photo: Archive)
Charlotte Brontë on Anne Brontë: “’Wildfell Hall’ is hardly desirable to preserve.” (Photo: Archive)
D.H. Lawrence on James Joyce: “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, journalist dirty-mindedness.” (Photo: Archive)
Virginia Woolf on Aldous Huxley: “All raw, uncooked, protesting.” (Photo: Archive)
Bret Easton Ellis on David Foster Wallace: “Saint David Foster Wallace: a generation trying to read him feels smart about themselves which is part of the whole bullshit package.” (Photo: Archive)
Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust: “I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.” (Photo: Archive)
Martin Amis on Anthony Burgess: “He went home, did the kitchen, spring-cleaned the flat, wrote two book reviews, a flute concerto and a film treatment, knocked off his gardening column for Pravda, phoned in his surfing page to the Sydney Morning Herald, and then test-drove a kidney dialysis machine for El Pais before settling down to some serious work.” (Photo: Archive)
William Faulkner on Mark Twain: “A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe.” (Photo: Archive)
Virginia Woolf on James Joyce: “I finished Ulysses and think it is a mis-fire. Genius it has, I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred.” (Photo: Archive)
Gustave Flaubert on Honoré de Balzac: “What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.” (Photo: Archive)
Gore Vidal on Truman Capote (again): “He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.” (Photo: Archive)
Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” (Photo: Archive)
Lord Byron on John Keats: “No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.” (Photo: Archive)
Norman Mailer On J.D. Salinger: “I seem to be alone in finding him no more than the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school.” (Photo: Archive)
Stephen King on JK Rowling and Stephanie Meyer: “The difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephanie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.” (Photo: Archive)
Ruth Rendell on Agatha Christie: “To say that Agatha Christie’s characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.” (Photo: Archive)
Vladimir Nabokov on Fyodor Dostoevsky: “Dostoevsky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity — all this is difficult to admire.” (Photo: Archive)
Norman Mailer on Jack Kerouac: “Kerouac lacks discipline, intelligence, honesty and a sense of the novel. His rhythms are erratic, his sense of character is nil, and he is as pretentious as a rich whore, sentimental as a lollypop.” (Photo: Archive)
We all know artists are temperamental, right? But, man…these burns are outrageous! Check out these great author insults.
![Tom Wolfe on Norman Mailer and John Updike: “[They're] two old piles of bones.” (Photo: Archive)](https://www.jetss.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/967.jpg)
![Toby Young on JK Rowling: “[The Harry Potter] books are a bland amalgam of more interesting work by more imaginative authors. The plots are feeble and episodic. And what little interest the characters and stories contain has long ago been eradicated by endless repetition.” (Photo: Archive)](https://www.jetss.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/2366.jpg)
