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Criticism often tears down promising career. Writing is about giving what moves you to the world to be a judge of. It's hard when people think it's shit. Smile though, some of the best writers got put down by other great writers. Another proof that art is something that is judged differently from people to people. Click on my source link of you want the whole list, but here is a play by play of the best kick in the balls writers gave each other...
Vladimir Nabokov thinks Hemingway is shit...
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 gores the living hell out of John Updike...
I can't stand him. Nobody will think to ask because I'm supposedly jealous; but I out-sell him. I'm more popular than he is, and I don't take him very seriously...oh, he comes on like the worker's son, like a modern-day D.H. Lawrence, but he's just another boring little middle-class boy hustling his way to the top if he can do it.
Nabokov strikes again, bashing Dostoevsky...maybe the guy takes himself a little too seriously...
Dostoevky's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity -- all this is difficult to admire.
Jane Austen takes the first of a line of beatings, this time by superior writter (personal opinion) Charlotte Brontë
Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would rather have written 'Pride and Prejudice'...than any of the Waverly novels? I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses
William Faulkner gives Mark Twain and all of his quoters something to think about...
A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy
Evelyn Waugh on sacro-saint modern writer Marcel Proust
I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.
Hemingway pimp slaps his co-American Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner (I like both writers, but this is pretty funny)...
Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You're thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes -- and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he's had his first one
Arguably the best hit in there.Mark Twain goes necrophiliac on Jane Austen...
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
Gore Vidal, like Nabokov, seems to show little love to everybody but himself. His next victim? Solzhenitsyn...
He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the US.
Tom Wolfe on Ernest Hemingway and his legacy...
Take Hemingway. People always think that the reason he's easy to read is that he is concise. He isn't. I hate conciseness -- it's too difficult. The reason Hemingway is easy to read is that he repeats himself all the time, using 'and' for padding.
Virginia Woolf tears James Joyce a new one...
I dislike 'Ulysses' more and more -- that is I think it more and more unimportant; and don't even trouble conscientiously to make out its meanings. Thank God, I need not write about it.
My man Hemingway gives James Joyce another well-deserved beating...
To me he is an enormously skillful f#*&-up and his book will do great damage to our country. Probably I should re-read it again to give you a truer answer. But I do not have to eat an entire bowl of scabs to know they are scabs...I hope he kills himself....
You guys had enough of Jane Austen rips? Too bad, here is another by Ralph Waldo Emerson. All in class and sincerity...
I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world.
Gore Vidal isn't immune to Martin Amis's spite...
Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice -- registry offices, 'Romeo and Juliet,' the disposable diaper -- is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda.
Norman Mailer gives an elbow drop from the third rope to Tom Wolfe....
The book has gas and runs out of gas, fills up again, goes dry. It is a 742-page work that reads as if it is fifteen hundred pages long....
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. So you read and you grab and you even find delight in some of these mounds of material. Yet all the while you resist -- how you resist! -- letting three hundred pounds take you over.
Keep smiling and keep working on your stories. It's not because a published writer or a stupid editor doesn't love them that they aren't good!
