Snarky

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 control my frenzy from the reader. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice,' I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Mark Twain on Jane Austen

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.

Norman Mailer on Tom Wolfe (A Man in Full)

That's not writing. That's typing.

Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

Hemingway was a jerk.

Harold Robbins on Ernest Hemingway

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?

Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste than Herman Melville, even in a great book like Moby Dick. He preaches and holds forth because he's not sure of himself. And he holds forth, often, so amateurishly.

D.H. Lawrence on Herman Melville (Moby Dick)