insults

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Stolen from the Internet and most emanating from more (and less) refined times:


-- There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.
Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope

-- That's not writing; That's typing.
Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac

-- [A book by Henry James] is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an eggshell, a bit of string.
H. G. Wells on Henry James

-- She looked like Lady Chatterley above the waist and the gamekeeper below.
Cyril Connolly on Vita Sackville-West

--He would not hlow his nose without moralising on the conditions in the handkerchief industry.
Cyril Connolly on George Orwell

-- I'm sure the poor woman meant well, but I wish she'd stick to recreating the glory that was Greece and not muck about with dear old modern homos.
Noel Coward on Mary Renault, known for her historical fiction about Ancient Greece

-- The stupid person's idea of the clever person.
Elizabeth Bowen in the Spectator (1936) on Aldous Huxley

-- She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.
Dorothy Parker, speaking of Katharine Hepburn

-- "He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."
Winston Churchill

-- "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts...for support rather than illumination."
Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

-- "In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily."
Charles, Count Talleyrand

-- "He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them."
James Reston (about Richard Nixon)

-- "There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure."
Jack E. Leonard
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