It’s not all elegant sentences and good taste in the literary world…sometimes words can wound and sometimes they can bite back…

Mark Twain on Jane Austen

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.

William Faulkner on Mark Twain
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.

William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway
He has never been known to use…