Here's an extract from I Used to Know That: Literature that shows what some great authors thought of some of their compatriots:
- "I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer." --Ayn Rand.
- "Poor Faulkner. Dow he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use." --Ernest Hemingway, having been informed that William Faulkner believed Hemingway "had no courage" and "had never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary."
- "That's not writing, that's typing." --Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac's On The Road.
- "This is not at all bad, except as prose." --Gore Vidal on Herman Wouk's The Winds of War.
- "At certain points, reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred-pound woman. Once she gets on top, it's over. Fall in love, or be asphyxiated." --Norman Mailer, on Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full.
- "No more than the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school." --Norman Mailer, on J. Salinger.
- "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." --Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman.
- "The characters are nearly indistinguishable. A man in a wheelchair cannot just be a man in a wheelchair; he must be a vehicle to help a lame metaphor get around. Such is the method of the Well-Crafted Short Story." --Colson Whitehead on Richard Frost's short-story collection A Multitude of Sings (Two years later, Ford responded by spitting on Whitehead).
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