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befall a mortal man is to be the husband of a lady poet.
    George Jean Nathan, American critic
    He has occasional flashes of silence that make his conversation perfectly delightful.
    British clergyman Sydney Smith on Thomas Babington Macaulay
    Isn’t it a shame that Maxwell Anderson’s poetic licence has expired.
    Noel Coward, British actor and dramatist
    A woman once incessantly pestered English writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson to read her play. Johnson told her that if she read it carefully herself, she’d find all the things he’d most likely ask her to correct.
    ‘But sir,’ she said, ‘I have no time. I have already so many irons in the fire.’
    ‘Well then, madam, the best thing that I can advise you is to put your tragedy along with your irons.’
    His imagination resembles the wings of an ostrich.
    Thomas Babington Macaulay on British writer John Dryden
    Warren Harding, the only man, or woman, or child who ever wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors, is dead.
    e.e. cummings, American poet
    I do not hate the critics. I have nothing but compassion for them. How can I hate the crippled, the mentally deficient and the dead?
    Albert Finney, British actor
    Critics are just eunuchs at a gangbang.
    George Burns, American comedian
    A hack writer who would have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tried out a few of the old proven ‘sure-fire’ literary skeletons with sufficient local colour to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.
    William Faulkner on fellow American writer Mark Twain
    Conrad spent a day finding the mot juste: then killed it.
    Ford Madox Ford on fellow British writer Joseph Conrad
    Addison was responsible for many of the evils from which English prose has since suffered. He made prose artful and whimsical, he made it sonorous when sonority was not needed, affected when it did not require affectation... He was the first Man of Letters. Addison had the misuse of an extensive vocabulary and so was able to invalidate a great number of words and expressions; the quality of his mind was inferior to the language which he used to express it.
    British critic Cyril Connolly on British statesman and essayist Joseph Addison
    God created the poet, then took a handful of the rubbish left over and made three critics.
    T.J. Thomas
    If you cannot get a job as a pianist in a brothel, you become a royal reporter.
    Max Hastings, British journalist
    Dear Randolph, utterly unspoilt by failure.
    Noel Coward on Winston’s son, writer Randolph Churchill
    A triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that wasn’t malignant and remove it.
    Evelyn Waugh on fellow British writer Randolph Churchill
    Jackie Collins is to writing what her sister Joan is to acting.
    Campbell Grison, critic
    Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers.
    Ernest Hemingway, American writer
    The essence of humour is surprise; that is why you laugh when you see a joke in Punch.
    A.P. Herbert, British humorist
    His ignorance was an Empire State Building of ignorance. You had to admire it for its size.
    American journalist, writer and all-round wit Dorothy Parker on New Yorker editor Harold Ross
    The Sun and Mirror have become the standard bearers of illiteracy.
    Welsh novelist Emyr Humphreys on the British tabloids.
    Barbara Cartland’s eyes were twin miracles of mascara and looked like two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.
    Clive James, Australian writer
    The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character.
    Lyndon B. Johnson, American president
    Indeed, the freedom with which Dr Johnson condemns whatever he disapproves is astonishing.
    Jane Welsh Carlyle, the ‘Great Victorian Wife’ of Thomas Carlyle
    A woman who writes commits two sins; she increases the number of books and decreases the number of women.
    Alphonse Kerr, Canadian politician
    The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he can’t get on with them.
    Rosamond Lehmann