Character Assassinations

[Jazz_]

From a collection gathered by Aubrey Malone...

Ralph Waldo Emerson
"One of those people who would be enormously improved by death" (Saki)

Algernon Charles Swinburne
"Swine Born" (Punch magazine)

Arnold Bennett
"The Hitler of the book racket" (Percy Lewis)

Joseph Conrad
"The wreck of Stevenson floating about in the slip-slop of Henry James" (George Moore)

Aldous Huxley
"A stupid person's idea of a clever person" (Elizabeth Bowen)

J. D. Salinger
"The greatest mind ever to stay in prep school" (Norman Mailer)

Ernest Hemingway
"A guy who keeps saying things over and over until you believe it must be good" (Raymond Chandler)

[sixsmith]

I'll leave it somebody else to catalogue Mailer's various grenades.

Truman Capote on Norman Mailer: “He has no talent. None, none, none!”

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."

"It is inhuman to attack [Truman] Capote. You are attacking an elf."

John Irving on Tom Wolfe: " [He] doesn't write novels: he writes journalistic hyperbole."

Tom Wolfe on Norman Mailer, John Irving and John Updike: "I think of the three of them now -- because there are now three -- as Larry, Curly and Moe"

Dale Peck on Rick Moody: "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation."

Robert Hughes on Julian Schnabel: "The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. The memoirs of Julian Schnabel, such as they are, remind one that the converse is also true. The unlived life is not worth examining."

"Indeed, Schnabel's work is to painting what Stallone's is to acting - a lurching display of oily pectorals, except that Schnabel makes bigger public claims for himself"

Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman: " Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'"

[Modest Proposal]

Truman Capote (who seems to be involved in a lot of these) about Jack Kerouak: "He doesn't write. He types."

And my personal favorite:

- George Bernard Shaw telegrammed Winston Churchill just prior to the opening of Major Barbara: "Have reserved two tickets for first night. Come and bring a friend if you have one."
- Churchill wired back, "Impossible to come to first night. Will come to second night, if you have one."

[sixsmith]

Aldous Huxley
"A stupid person's idea of a clever person" (Elizabeth Bowen)



Now that's just crazy talk.

[mal4mac]

'I liked your opera. Perhaps I will set it to music.' - Beethoven to Paer [and he did, the result was Fidelio.]

'Mr Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour.' - Rossini

(Dorothy Parker on being told that President Calvin Coolidge had died): 'How could they tell?'

Nancy Astor - You're drunk.
Churchill - And you're ugly. But in the morning, I shall be sober.

Nancy Astor - If you were my husband, I would poison your tea.
Churchill - Madam, if you were my wife, I'd drink it.

[kiki1982]

@Mal4mac:

The same quote has been attributed to Mozart. I think that might be more right, because at the time the opera Leonora came out in 1804, in Dresden where Paer was Hofkapellmeister (which compelled him to stay there), Beethoven was composer in residence in Vienna where he courted Josephine Deym née Brunswick. Paer and Beethoven can never have spoken to each other, let alone written. To add to this, Beethoven was having problems with his hearing (ringing in his ears) already three years before the opera came out and he was having severe problems, even at just hearing his own playing. Although Czerny stated that he could still hear music and speech normally until 1812, that needs to be doubted as Cook writes that Beethoven complained himself since 1801 about difficulties in a professional and private environment. Although it can be a coincidence that the frequences for speaking were not the same as the ringing in his ears... He also was tutoring in Vienna Ferdinand Ries from 1801 to 1805.

The quote has also been attributed Mozart who told Strauss.

What about this one:

Marilyn Monroe to Einstain: 'How great would our children be if they had your brains and my beauty.'
Einstein; 'Imagie that it would be the other way round.'

:lol:

[mal4mac]

Kiki - you might be right, I have also seen it attributed to Mozart, so I did a bit of digging to try and find the actual source. As I found a reasonably reputable source for the Beethoven quote, I went with that:

"Beethoven, meeting Paer after a performance of the latter's opera Eleanora, said to him, " I like your opera : I think I will set it to music." That was perhaps not very nice, at the moment, for Paer ; but as the result was Fidelio..."

from "A Musical Moteley" by ERNEST NEWMAN

http://www.archive.org/stream/musicalmotley00newmuoft/musicalmotley00newmuoft_djvu.txt

Do you have a source for the Mozart quote? Maybe Beethoven couldn't resist stealing it...

[sixsmith]

I think Clive James has a pretty good read on Sartre:

"Skeptics might say that a knack for making duplicity look profound was inherent in Sartre's style of argument. Students who tackle his creative prose in the novel sequence The Road to Freedom or the play Kean (his most convincing illustration of existentialism as a living philosophy) will find clear moments of narrative, but all clarity evaporates when it comes to the discursive prose of his avowedly philosophical works.... But those of us unfettered by being either professional philosophers or patriotic Frenchmen can surely suggest that even Sartre's first and most famous treatise shows all the signs of his later mummery. Where Sartre got it from is a mystery begging to be explained. It could have had something to do with his prewar period in Berlin, and especially with the influence of his admired Heidegger. In Sartre's style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas."


"...in philosophy, the infinite regress is a sign that someone has made a mistake in logic. In ordinary life, it is a sign that someone is hiding from reality. Sartre hid. Of course he did; and if he did, anybody can, including us; although I think that if we hide in lies, the lies should not be blasphemous. Sartre blasphemed when he took upon himself, and kept for the rest of his life, battle honors that properly belonged to people who ran risks he never ran, and who died in his stead. All his other weaknesses can be comprehended and easily pardoned if not dismissed: Most of us would have shown the same frail spirit. But to get a play put on, Sartre bent his knee to the occupation authorities. For a man whose Resistance group had done nothing but meet, he was a haughty inquisitor during l'Épuration. Memories of the French Revolution were not enough to tell him that there might be something wrong with the spectacle of a philosopher sitting on a tribunal instead of standing in front of it. Sartre's autobiography was the last thing he wanted us to know, and so his philosophy was never felt, but all a pose."

[kiki1982]

Kiki - you might be right, I have also seen it attributed to Mozart, so I did a bit of digging to try and find the actual source. As I found a reasonably reputable source for the Beethoven quote, I went with that:

"Beethoven, meeting Paer after a performance of the latter's opera Eleanora, said to him, " I like your opera : I think I will set it to music." That was perhaps not very nice, at the moment, for Paer ; but as the result was Fidelio..."

from "A Musical Moteley" by ERNEST NEWMAN

http://www.archive.org/stream/musicalmotley00newmuoft/musicalmotley00newmuoft_djvu.txt

Do you have a source for the Mozart quote? Maybe Beethoven couldn't resist stealing it...

After some digging, I came about Heribert Hoffmeister in the 1950s. He wrote a book Anekdotenschatz which featured the anecdote of Beetoven and Paër, but he must have had it from someone else. The earliest source I have come by is Hector Berlioz who allegedly recounted it, but he had never had contact with Beethoven himself, as he only went to that part of the world until after Beethoven had died. Nonetheless, he was a great admirer of the composer, but this is not an argument.

The German version of the quote is nowhere to be found apart from in Hoffmeister's book of the fifties... "Ihre Oper gefällt mir, daher will ich sie in Musik setzen". Even only looking for "Ihre Oper gefällt mir" or even "Ich mag Ihre Oper", does not give any results. I found one source on Google books (an edition of Fidelio from 1985) that claimed that Beethoven had an opera commissioned by an editor who went out of business and that the contract was taken over by a theatre in Vienna, which prepared a translation of the French version of Leonore, l'amour conjugale for Beethoven as lyrics for the opera commissioned. It could also be a coincidence that Paër composed a piece based on the same story. It is true that Beethoven owned a score of Paër's work, but it is nowhere mentioned that the two met. Freedom was a very attractive theme then, so it is not unthinkable that two composers more or less at the same time made a work with the same basic setting.

The German version of the quote is nowhere associated with Mozart or another composer.

Possibly it is a phantom-quote that was never really said, but that was kind of an urban legend.

[Jazz_]

Here's some more ;)

Truman Capote
"A sweetly vicious old lady" (Tennessee Williams)

Ian Fleming
"Someone who got off with women because he couldn't get on with them" (Rosamond Lehmann)

Ezra Pound
"A sort of revolutionary simpleton" (Percy Wyndham Lewis)

George Bernard Shaw
"An atheist trembling in the haunted corridor" (W. B. Yeats)

P. G. Wodehouse
"English literature's performing flea" (Sean O'Casey)

[stlukesguild]

The vast majority of these quotes would seem to amount to something akin to sour grapes... especially when one considers that in most instances it is the writer being spoken of in an unkind light who is actually the far greater author.
Still... I can't resist a few:

I must say Bernard Shaw is greatly improved by music.
- T.S. Eliot

He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.
-Voltaire

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
- Robert Benchley

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.
- Edith Sitwell

He was humane but not human.
- e e Cummings (about Ezra Pound)

He's a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.
- Gore Vidal (about Truman Capote)

I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
- Virginia Woolf

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
-William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.
-Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes.
-Aaron Copland on Ralph Vaughan Williams

...stewed-up fragments of quotation in the sauce of a would-be dirty mind.
-D. H. Lawrence on James Joyce

To me Edith looks like something that would eat its young.
-Dorothy Parker on Dame Edith Evans

Mr. Huxley is perhaps one of those people who have to perpetrate thirty bad novels before producing a good one.
-TS Elliot On Aldous Huxley

Henry James has a mind - a sensibility -so fine that no mere idea could ever penetrate it.
-T. S. Eliot on Henry James

There are some classics... the subject of which is unknown:

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."
-Clarence Darrow

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it.
-Moses Hadas

He had delusions of adequacy.
-Walter Kerr

He has Van Gogh's ear for music.
-Billy Wilder

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 (attributed)

[Emil Miller]

I found this to be particularly appropriate

"Why don't you write books people can read?"
- Nora Joyce to her husband James.

[MANICHAEAN]

CLARK GABLE: "Do you write Mr Faulkner?"
FAULKNER: "Yes Mr Gable. What do you do?"

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk & the yoghurt.

Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can.

The Scots are incapable of considering their literary geniuses purely as writers or artists. They must be either an excuse for a glass or a text for the next sermon.

His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run but not to soar.

Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.

I once heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

[prendrelemick]

"Its like being savaged by a dead sheep" said Dennis Healy of Geoffrey Howe's attack (verbal)upon him.

[Vautrin]

Mark Twain on Ambrose Bierce:

"Bierce has written some admirable things--fugitive pieces--but none of them are 'Nuggets.' There is humor in Dod Grile, but for every laugh that is in his book there are five blushes, ten shudders & a vomit. The laugh is too expensive."
- Letter to Chatto and Windus, April 8, 1874

[keilj]

Mark Twain - "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"

Twain also ripped Charles Dickens up pretty good, and he said of Jane Austen "It's a shame they let her die of natural causes"

[PeterL]

Mark Twain - "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"

Twain also ripped Charles Dickens up pretty good, and he said of Jane Austen "It's a shame they let her die of natural causes"

I missed this the first time around, but Cooper immediately came to mind. Odly enough, I have seen people slam Twain, but I can't imagine why, unless they are illiterate.

Dickens would have been a good writer, if he had learned to edit his work.

[kiki1982]

Dickens would have been a good writer, if he had learned to edit his work.

:lol:

[keilj]

I missed this the first time around, but Cooper immediately came to mind. Odly enough, I have seen people slam Twain, but I can't imagine why, unless they are illiterate.

Dickens would have been a good writer, if he had learned to edit his work.

Yeah, the only criticisms of Twain that I have seen focus on his Tom Sawyer books - which were really a small part of his overall body of work. The bulk to Twain's books were adult, filled with humor, satire, and pathos.

And anyone who has read Twain should see that his command of the written word is nearly second to none