Vicious Nonsense - Kristen Hewitt

Quote Collection

Rating: 7/10

Given that the road to publishing is wrought with vulnerability and potential rejection, you would think that writers would afford their fellow authors a certain level of generosity.  Well, think again.

With a subtitle of “Quips, Snubs & Jabs by Literary Friends & Foes” it should be clear what the reader is in for!  Another fun installment for my own collection of quirky books about random nonsense.

But enough of my words, lets hear those of the noteworthy. 

Patricia Lockwood on John Updike

“No one can seem to agree on his surviving merits.  He wrote like an angel, the consensus goes, except when he was writing like a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunninglingus to his typewriter.”

Oscar Wilde on George Meredith’s Intentions

“As a writer he has mastered everything except language; as a novelist he can do everything except tell a story; as an artist he is everything except articulate.”

Martin Amis on J. G. Ballard’s Crash

“Ballard is the rarest kind of writer, an unselfconscious stylist: it is the measure of his creative narcissism that he has his eye on no audience.”

Aldous Huxley on Jack Kerouac’s On The Road

“I got a little bored after a time.  I mean, the road seemed awfully long.”

Randall Jarrell on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

“This reads like it was written on a typewriter…by a typewriter.”

Book Pairing(s): R.I.P by Susan K. Hom, The Cunning Linguist by Richard Lederer, The Snark Handbook by Lawrence Dorfman