Robert Louis Stevenson
on Walt Whitman“…like a large shaggy dog just unchained scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.”
Joseph Conrad
on D.H. Lawrence“Filth. Nothing but obscenities.”
Lord Byron
on John Keats (1820)“Here are Johnny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry, and three novels by God knows whom… 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.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
on Jane Austen“Miss Austen’s novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer . . . is marriageableness.”
Charles Baudelaire
on Voltaire (1864)“I grow bored in France — and the main reason is that everybody here resembles Voltaire…the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.”
William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac 
“That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
Mark Twain
on Jane Austen (1898) 
“I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
Virginia Woolf on James Joyce 
“[Ulysses
is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”Ouch.
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