Избранные цитаты писателей друг о друге

Прошу прощения, что на английском, т.к. часть наверняка переведена на русский, и я не рискну переводить, но думаю, всё более или менее понятно :)

30. Густав Флобер о Жордж Санд: “A great cow full of ink.

29. Роберт Льюис Стивенсон об Уолте Уитмене: “…like a large shaggy dog just unchained scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.”

28. Фридрих Ницще о Данте Альегери: “A hyena that wrote poetry on tombs.”

27. Гарольд Блум о Джоанне Роллинг (2000): “How to read ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.”

26. Владимир Набоков о Фёдоре Достоевском:“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.”

25. Гертруда Стайн об Эзре Паунд: “A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”

24. Вирджиния Вульф об Олдосе Хаксли: “All raw, uncooked, protesting.”

23. Герберт Уэллс о Бернарде Шоу: “An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”

22. Джозеф Конрал о Д. Лоуренсе: “Filth. Nothing but obscenities.”

21. Лорд Байрон о Джоне Китсе (1820): “Here are Johnny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry, and three novels by God knows whom… No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.”

20. Владимир Набоков о Джозефе Конраде: “I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches.”

19. Дилан Томас о Редьярде Киплинге: “Mr Kipling … stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.”

18. Ральф Уолдо Эмерсон о Джен Остин: “Miss Austen’s novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer . . . is marriageableness.”

17. Мартин Эмис о Сервантесе: “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.”

16. Шарль Бодлер о Вольтере (1864): “I grow bored in France — and the main reason is that everybody here resembles Voltaire…the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.”

15. Уильям Фолкнер об Эрнесте Хемингуэе: “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

14. Эрнест Хэмингуэй об Уильяме Фолкнере: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

13. Гор Видал о Трумене Капоте: “He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”

12. Оскар Уайлд об Александре Поупе: “There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”

11. Владир Набоков об Эрнесте Хемингуэе (1972): “As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”

10. Генри Джеймс об Эдгаре Аллане По (1876): “An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”

9. Трумен Капоте о Джеке Керуаке: «That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

8. Элизабет Бишоп о Джероме Сэлинджере: “I HATED [Catcher in the Rye]. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?”

7. Д. Лоуренс о Германе Мелвилле (1923): “Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like ‘Moby Dick’….One wearies of the grand serieux. There’s something false about it. And that’s Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!”

6. Уистен Хью Оден о Роберте Браунинге: “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.”

5. Ивлин Во о Марселе Прусте (1948): “I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”

4. Марк Твен о Джей Остин (1898): “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.”

3. Вирджиния Вульф о Джеймсе Джойсе: “[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”

2. Уильям Фолкнер о Марке Твене (1922): “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.

1. Д. Лоуренс о Джеймсе Джойсе (1928): “My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.”