archaeologicals:

Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope

“There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”

Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust 

“I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”

Mark Twain 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.”

Virginia Woolf on James Joyce

“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”

William Faulkner on Mark Twain 

“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.”

Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe 

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

W. H. Auden on Robert Browning

“I don’t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn’t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.”

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?”

Virginia Woolf on Aldous Huxley

“All raw, uncooked, protesting.”

H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw

“An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”

Martin Amis on Miguel Cervantes

“Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 — the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that ‘Don Quixote’ could do.”

Gore Vidal on Truman Capote

“He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”

Dylan Thomas on Rudyard Kipling

“Mr Kipling … stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.”