It’s always interesting to learn well-known authors’ opinions of each other – particularly when they didn’t like each other’s work…

Oscar Wilde on Charles Dickens:

“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”

Joseph Conrad on Herman Melville:

“He knows nothing of the sea. Fantastic — ridiculous.”

Vladimir Nabokov on Joseph Conrad:

“I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romantic clichés.”

Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe:

“An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”

H.G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw:

“An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”

Gustave Flaubert on George Sand:

“A great cow full of ink.”

Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac:

“That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

Mark Twain wrote that Jane Austen’s books “madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy…Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

Found at Futility Closet, a blog self-described as “an idler’s miscellany of compendious amusements”.