Scorn (18 page)

The work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
Virginia Woolf on
Ulysses
by James Joyce

She has been a peculiar kind of snob without really belonging to a social group with whom to be snobbish.
Edmund Wilson on Virginia Woolf

We have met too late. You are too old for me to have any effect on you.
James Joyce on meeting W.B. Yeats

Wanting to meet an author because you like his books is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.
Margaret Atwood

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. How fucking difficult is that? It's the sentence that bestrides the fucking book I reviewed for you. It is the sentence I wrote first in my fucking review. It is 35 fucking letters long, which is why I wrote that it was. And so some useless cunt sub-editor decides to change it to ‘jumps over a lazy dog'. Can you fucking count? Can you see that that makes it a 33 letter sentence? So it looks as if I can't count, and the cunting author of the book, poor Mr Dunn, cannot count. The whole bastard book turns on the sentence being as I wrote it, and that is exactly 35 letters long. Why do you meddle? What do you think you achieve with that kind of dumb-witted smart arsery? Why do you change things you do not understand without consulting? Why do you believe you know best when you know fuck all, jack shit? That is as bad as editing can be. Fuck. I hope you're proud. It will be small relief for the author that nobody reads your poxy magazine. Never ever ask me to write something for you. And don't pay me. I'd rather take 400 quid for assassinating a crack whore's only child in a revenge killing for a busted drug deal –
my integrity would be less compromised. Jesus fucking wept. I don't know what else to say.
British columnist Giles Coren in a memo to the editor of his paper's review-and-listings section when he noticed that a word had been changed in his review of a novel by Mark Dunn

The number one book of the ages was written by a committee, and it was called The Bible.
Louis B. Mayer, to a writer who complained of excessive editing

Why don't you write books people can read?
Mrs Nora Joyce to her husband, James

An essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognised.
Tom Stoppard on James Joyce

He had a genius for backing into the limelight.
Lowell Thomas, biographer of T.E. Lawrence

They are rather out of touch with reality; by reality I mean shops like Selfridges, and motor buses, and the
Daily Express
.
T.E. Lawrence on expatriate authors living in Paris

A bore and a bounder and a prig. He was intoxicated with his own youth, and loathed any milieu which he couldn't dominate. Certainly he had none of a gentleman's instincts, strutting about Peace Conferences in Arab dress.
Sir Henry Channon on T.E. Lawrence

A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow.
J.B. Priestley

At the age of 50 Priestley will be saying, why don't the highbrows admire me? It isn't true that I only write for money. He will be enormously rich; but there will be that thorn in his shoe – or so I hope.
Virginia Woolf on J.B. Priestley

It seems that Dr Leavis gave a lecture at Nottingham University on ‘Literature in My Time' and declared that apart from D.H. Lawrence there had been no literature in his time. He knocked hell out of everybody, and no doubt had all the Lucky Jims rolling down the aisles. Like Groucho Marx on another academic occasion, whatever it was he was against it. Virginia Woolf was a ‘slender talent'; Lytton Strachey ‘irresponsible and unscrupulous'; W.H. Auden ‘the career type', fixed at ‘the undergraduate stage'; Spender ‘no talent whatsoever'; Day-Lewis ‘Book Society author'; the whole age ‘dismal', and outlook ‘very poor'. By the time Dr Leavis caught his train back to Cambridge, there was hardly anything left to read in Nottingham. I have not the pleasure of the doctor's acquaintance – he was up at Cambridge just after me – but I have a vague but impressive vision of him, pale and glittering-eyed, shining with integrity, marching out of Downing to close whole departments of libraries, to snatch books out of people's hands, to proclaim the bitter truth that nobody writes
anything worth reading. There is Lawrence; there is Leavis on Lawrence; perhaps a disciple, Jones, is writing something – let us say, Jones on Leavis on Lawrence, after that, nothing.
J.B. Priestley on F.R. Leavis

He is important not because he leads to Mr J.B. Priestley but because he leads to Jane Austen, to appreciate whose distinction is to feel that life isn't long enough to permit of one's giving much time to Fielding or any to Mr Priestley.
F.R. Leavis on Fielding

It is sad to see Milton's great lines bobbing up and down in the sandy desert of Dr Leavis's mind with the grace of a fleet of weary camels.
Edith Sitwell on F.R. Leavis,
Aspects of Modern Poetry

Then Edith Sitwell appeared, her nose longer than an anteater's, and read some of her absurd stuff.
Lytton Strachey, An evening at Arnold Bennett's House

I do not want Miss Mannin's feelings to be hurt by the fact that I have never heard of her. At the moment I am debarred from the pleasures of putting her in her place by the fact she has not got one.
Edith Sitwell on Ethel Mannin

So you've been reviewing Edith Sitwell's last piece of virgin dung, have you? Isn't she a poisonous thing of a woman, lying
concealing, flipping, plagiarizing, misquoting, and being as clever a crooked literacy publicist as ever.
Dylan Thomas on Edith Sitwell

He was a detestable man. Men pressed money on him, and women their bodies. Dylan took both with equal contempt. His great pleasure was to humiliate people.
A.J.P. Taylor on Dylan Thomas

Somebody's boring me. I think it's me.
Dylan Thomas after talking continuously for some time

You have but two topics, yourself and me, and I'm sick of both.
Samuel Johnson on James Boswell

E.M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He's a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain't going to be no tea.
Katherine Mansfield on E.M. Forster

I loathe you. You revolt me stewing in your consumption.
D.H. Lawrence to Katherine Mansfield

Good reviews make your heart swell. Bad reviews are like seeing your daughter heckled during the Nativity play.
Mark Haddon

Like a piece of litmus paper he has always been quick to take the colour of the times.
The
Observer
on Aldous Huxley

You could tell by his conversation which volume of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
he'd been reading. One day it would be Alps, Andes and Apennines, and the next it would be the Himalayas and the Hippocratic Oath.
Bertrand Russell on Aldous Huxley

The stupid person's idea of a clever person.
Elizabeth Bowen writing in the
Spectator,
on Aldous Huxley

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
Samuel Johnson to an author

I hate a fellow whom pride, or cowardice, or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl; let him come out as I do, and bark.
Samuel Johnson

There is no arguing with Johnson; for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.
Oliver Goldsmith on Samuel Johnson

Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering, palsied,
pulseless lot that make up England. They've got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it's a marvel they can breed. Why, why, why, was I born an Englishman!
D.H. Lawrence after a publisher rejected his manuscript of
Sons and Lovers

I like to write when I feel spiteful: it's like having a good sneeze.
D.H. Lawrence, review of
Art-Nonsense
by Eric Gill, in the
Phoenix

He's impossible. He's pathetic and preposterous. He writes like a sick man.
Gertrude Stein on D.H. Lawrence

I am only one, only one, only one. Only one being, one at the same time. Not two, not three, only one. Only one life to live, only sixty minutes in one hour. Only one pair of eyes. Only one brain. Only one being. Being only one, having only one pair of eyes, having only one time, having only one life, I cannot read your MS three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.
A.J. Fifield, rejecting a manuscript by Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein's prose is a cold, black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is … the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through, and all along.
Percy Wyndham Lewis

… a flabby lemon and pink giant, who hung his mouth open as though he were an animal at the zoo inviting buns – especially when the ladies were present.
Wyndham Lewis on Ford Madox Ford

I do not think I have ever seen a nastier-looking man … Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.
Ernest Hemingway on Percy Wyndham Lewis

He has never been known to use a word that might send a man to a dictionary.
William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think emotions come from big words?
Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner

If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come.
Raymond Chandler

Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?
William, Duke of Gloucester, later George III, to Edward Gibbon

Gibbon's style is detestable; but it is not the worst thing about him.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Edward Gibbon

Gibbon is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow, and poisons our literary club for me. I class him among infidel wasps and enormous snakes.
James Boswell on Edward Gibbon

That he was a coxcomb and a bore, weak, vain, pushing, curious, garrulous, was obvious to all who were acquainted with him. That he could not reason, that he had no wit, no humour, no eloquence, is apparent from his writings. Nature had made him a slave and an idolater. His mind resembled those creepers which the botanists call parasites and which can subsist only by clinging round the stems and imbibing the juices of stronger plants.

Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a tablebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London … Everything which another man would have hidden, everything the publication of which would have made another man hang himself, was a matter of exaltation to his weak and diseased mind.
Thomas Babington Macaulay on James Boswell

I wish I was as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything.
Lord Melbourne on Thomas Babington Macaulay

You know, when I am gone you will be sorry you never heard me speak.
Sydney Smith to Thomas Babington Macaulay, a non-stop talker

CONCERNED LADY: Oo poor 'ickle fing, did oo hurt oo's 'ickle finger then?
MACAULAY, AGED 4: Thank you, Madam, but the agony has somewhat abated.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, quoted in Wanda Orton's biography

Rogers is not very well …. Don't you know he has produced a couplet? When he is delivered of a couplet, with infinite labour and pain, he takes to his bed, has straw laid down, the knocker tied up, expects his friends to call and make enquiries, and the answer at the door invariably is ‘Mr Rogers and his little couplet are as well as can be expected.' When he produces an Alexandrine he keeps to his bed a day longer.
Sydney Smith on Samuel Rogers

Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else's dirty water.
Alexander Woollcott on Marcel Proust. Attrib.

The majority of husbands remind me of an orang-utan trying to play the violin.
Honoré de Balzac

A fat little flabby person with the face of a baker, the clothes of a cobbler, the size of a barrelmaker, the manners of a stocking salesman and the dress of an innkeeper.
Victor de Balabin on Honoré de Balzac,
Diary

Everywhere I go I'm asked if university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
Flannery O'Connor

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Dorothy Parker on Benito Mussolini's
L'Amante del Cardinale, Claudia Particella

‘That's a very good idea, Piglet,' said Pooh. ‘We'll practise it now as we go along. But it's no good going home to practise it, because it's a special Outdoor Song Which Has To Be Sung In The Snow.'

‘Are you sure?' asked Piglet anxiously.