I once wrote a post on Mudslinging Authors, authors dissing other authors. Today for your entertainment or for vindication of your opinion on one of the following authors, I present another edition of Mudslinging Authors and Literary Daggers:

Anatole France on Emile Zola: “His work is evil, and he is one of those unhappy beings of whom one can say that it would be better had he never been born.”

G.K. Chesterton on Emile Zola: “I am grown up, and do not worry myself much about Zola’s immorality. The thing I cannot stand is his morality…. Zola was worse than a pornographer, he was a pessimist.”

George Bernard Shaw on Shakespeare: “With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his… it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.”

Israel Zangwill on George Bernard Shaw: “The way Bernard Shaw believes in himself is very refreshing in these atheistic days when so many people believe in no God at all.”

Valdimir Nabakov on Ernest Hemingway: “As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”

Gore Vidal on Hemingway: “What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?”

William Faulkner on Henry James: “One of the nicest old ladies I ever met.”

Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe: “An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”

Dame Edith Sitwell on Virginia Woolf: “Virginia Woolf’s writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.”

Virginia Woolf on James Joyce: “[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”

Willliam Thackeray on Jonathan Swift: “A monster, gibbering, shrieking and gnashing imprecations against mankind.”

Thomas Carlyle on Percy Byshe Shelley: “Poor Shelley always was, and is, a kind of ghastly object; colourless, pallid, tuneless, without health or warmth or vigour.”

John Keats on William Wordsworth: “Wordsworth has left a bad impression wherever he visited in town by his egotism, vanity and bigotry.”

H.G. Wells on Joseph Conrad: “One could always baffle Conrad by saying ‘humour’.”

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