Top 10 Best Literary Insults

Found these at Incurable Insomniac

#10 - GORE VIDAL ON TRUMAN CAPOTE
"He's a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices."

#09 - TRUMAN CAPOTE ON JACK KEROUAC
"That's not writing, that's typing."

#08 - ERNEST HEMINGWAY VS. WILLIAM FAULKNER
Faulkner: "[Hemingway] has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
Hemingway: "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"

#07 - EDMUND WILSON ON CARL SANDBURG
"The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg."

#06 - RALPH WALDO EMERSON ON JANE AUSTEN
"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."

#05 - VIRGINIA WOOLF ON ULYSSES
"[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples."

#04 - D. H. LAWRENCE ON JAMES JOYCE
"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—what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new!"

#03 - ELIZABETH BISHOP ON THE CATCHER IN THE RYE
"I HATED the Salinger story. 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?"

#02 - CHARLES DARWIN ON SHAKESPEARE
"I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me."

#01 - GORE VIDAL VS. WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY
Vidal: "As far as I am concerned, the only crypto Nazi I can think of is yourself."
Buckley: “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in you goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”
—Democratic National Convention, 1968