A copy of a Superman #1 comic book sold recently for $1 million and nerds all over America could be heard yelling at their mothers for throwing their copies away when they cleaned out the basement.
His face was filled with broken commandments.
—JOHN MASEFIELD
She’s the sort of woman who lives for others—you can tell the others by their hunted expression.
—C. S. LEWIS
Insults and More Insults
He was a great friend of mine. Well, as much as you could be a friend of his, unless you were a fourteenyear-old nymphet.18
A little emasculated mass of inanity.19
He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.20
I am reading Henry James . . . and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.21
In her last days, she resembled a spoiled pear.22
He is always willing to lend a helping hand to the ones above him.23
I am fairly unrepentant about her poetry. I really think that three quarters of it is gibberish. However, I must crush down these thoughts; otherwise the dove of peace will shit on me.24
Match the Insult to the Book25
. The Idiot (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
. Skinny Bitch (Freedman and Barnouin)
. Lullaby (Chuck Palahniuk)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J. K. Rowling)
Fearand Loathing in Las Vegas
(Hunter Thompson)
You foul, loathsome, evil little cockroach.
You have delighted us long enough.
Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.
I hate you . . . you are the type, the incarnation, the acme of the most insolent and self-satisfied, the most vulgar and loathsome commonplaceness. Yours is the commonplaceness of pomposity, of self-satisfaction and olympian serenity. You are the most ordinary of the ordinary!
Is that a beard, or are you eating a muskrat?
Coffee is for pussies.
I worship the quicksand he walks in.
—ART BUCHWALD
When Dorothy Parker was told that Calvin Coolidge had died, she asked: “How can they tell?”
She could carry off anything; and some people said that she did.
—ADA LEVERSON
They hardly make’em like him any more—but just to be on the safe side, he should be castrated anyway.
—HUNTER S. THOMPSON
He’s as useless as a pulled tooth.
—MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style.
—LEO TOLSTOY
He was a bit like a corkscrew.
Twisted, cold, and sharp.
—KATE CRUISE O’BRIEN
He’s a wit with dunces, and a dunce with wits.
—ALEXANDER POPE
Oscar Wilde
There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.
He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.
When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.
I don’t recognize you—I’ve changed a lot.
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
One should always be in love. This is the reason one should never marry.
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
She is a peacock in everything but beauty.
He hadn’t a single redeeming vice.
He has one of those characteristic British faces that, once seen, are never remembered.
The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.
He has a brain of feathers, and a heart of lead.
—ALEXANDER POPE
He had delusions of adequacy.
He was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.
—WILLIAM FAULKNER
The ineffable dunce has nothing to say and says it with a liberal embellishment of bad delivery, embroidering it with reasonless vulgarities of attitude, gesture, and attire. There never was an impostor so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and offensively daft. He makes me tired.
—AMBROSE BIERCE ON OSCAR WILDE
I want to reach your mind—where is it currently located?
—ASHLEIGH BRILLIANT
Why don’t you get a haircut?
You look like a chrysanthemum.
—P. G. WODEHOUSE
She was a large woman who seemed not so much dressed as upholstered.26
—JAMES MATTHEW BARRIE
She was what we used to call a suicide blonde—dyed by her own hand.
—SAUL BELLOW
Full Circle (ish) Snark
Sir Walter Scott, according to Mark Twain He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote.
Mark Twain, according to William Faulkner 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, according to Ernest Hemingway Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You’re thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes—and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he’s had his first one.
Ernest Hemingway, according to Vladimir Nabokov I read him for the first time in the early forties, something about bells, balls, and bulls, and loathed it.
Catfight
Tom Wolfe, according to John Irving You see people reading him on airplanes, the same people who are reading John Grisham, for Christ’s sake . . . I’m using the argument against him that he can’t write, that his sentences are bad, that it makes you wince. You know, if you were a good skater, could you watch someone just fall down all the time? Could you do that? I can’t do that.
Tom Wolfe, according to Norman Mailer At certain points, reading [A Man in Full] can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundredpound woman. Once she gets on top, it’s over. Fall in love, or be asphyxiated.
Tom Wolfe, according to John Updike A Man in Full still amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form. Like a movie desperate to recoup its bankers’ investment, the novel tries too hard to please us.
John Irving, Norman Mailer, and John Updike, according to Tom Wolfe Larry, Curly, and Moe. Updike, Mailer, and Irving. My three stooges.... A Man in Full had frightened them. They were shaken. It was as simple as that. A Man in Full was an example . . . of the likely new direction: the intensely realistic novel . . . a revolution in content rather than form . . . that was about to sweep the arts in America, a revolution that would soon make many prestigious artists, such as our three old novelists, appear effete and irrelevant.
I will always love the false image I had of you.
—ASHLEIGH BRILLIANT
She’s so boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
—ALAN BENNETT
She has been kissed as often as a police-court Bible, and by much the same class of people.
—ROBERTSON DAVIES
Her skin was white as leprosy.
—S. T. COLERIDGE
He was about as useful in a crisis as a sheep.
—DOROTHY EDEN
I could never learn to like her, except on a raft at sea with no other provisions in sight.
—MARK TWAIN
He was trying to save both his faces.27
That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting.
—DOUGLAS ADAMS
She
looked like a huge ball of fur on two well-developed legs.
—NANCY MITFORD
He was so crooked, you could have used his spine for a safety-pin.
—DOROTHY L. SAYERS
He is mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
—LADY CAROLINE LAMB
She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitchfork.
—JONATHAN SWIFT
Dorothy Parker was invited to a party where most of the other guests looked as if they had stepped straight out of a church-hall production of La Bohēme. “Where on earth do all these people come from?” her companion asked. “I think that after it’s all over they crawl back into the woodwork,” she replied.
She resembles the Venus de Milo: she is very old, has no teeth, and has white spots on her yellow skin.
—HEINRICH HEINE
Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.
—WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
She not only expects the worst, but makes the worst of it when it happens.
—MICHAEL ARLEN
Failure has gone to his head.
—WILSON MIZNER
Snarky Criticism
An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.28
Isn’t she a poisonous thing of a woman, lying, concealing, flipping, plagiarising, misquoting, and being as clever a crooked literary publicist as ever?29
I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.30
Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig [Jane Austen] up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.31
E. M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.32
I can’t read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up.33
His work is evil, and he is one of those unhappy beings of whom one can say that it would be better had he never been born.34
A more sententious, holding-forth old bore, who expected every hero-worshipping adenoidal little twerp of a student-poet to hang on his every word I never saw.35
He is so mean, he won’t let his little baby have more than one measle at a time.
—EUGENE FIELD
Charles Lamb I sincerely believe to be in some considerable degree insane. A more pitiful, rickety, gasping, staggering, stammering tomfool I do not know. He is witty by denying truisms and abjuring good manners. His speech wriggles hither and thither with an incessant painful fluctuation; not an opinion in it or a fact or even a phrase that you can thank him for....
—THOMAS CARLYLE
Bret Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward, a Jeremy Diddler, he is brim full of treachery, and he conceals his Jewish birth as carefully as if he considered it a disgrace.
—MARK TWAIN
I regard you with an indifference bordering on aversion.
—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
She never lets ideas interrupt the easy flow of her conversation.
—JEAN WEBSTER
God was bored by him.
—VICTOR HUGO
SMARTS
(OR LACK THEREOF)
SMARTS
OR LACK THEREOF
I’m exhausted. Knowing everything is hard work, and even though I kind of get off on maintaining my IQ while my fellow humans seem to be getting dumber than ever before, it’s enough to make me take to my bed. Thank God you have this book in your hands—otherwise you might be tuning out to some idiotic reality television show or cruising porn on the ’Net. What’s that? You want to jump in and say something? Here’s some advice: Refrain from Twittering something that seems intellectual when you clearly don’t know what you’re talking about. If someone else’s opinion is out there before yours ... well, is that really so bad? Keep reading, pal. That’s the only way to exercise your mind. You can be the sharpest knife in the drawer.36
The twinkle in his
eyes is actually
the sun shining
between his ears.
I’m sorry, how
many times did
your parents drop
you when you
were a baby?
You’re changing
your mind? And you
think the new one
will be any better?
I am so clever
sometimes I don’t
understand a single
word of what I’m
saying.
Instant idiot. Just
add alcohol.
I’m sarcastic
because it’s
the body’s
natural
defense
against stupid.
He’s about as useless as the pope’s testicles.
He’s so stupid he
got hit by a parked
car.
Does this rag
smell like
chloroform to
you?
You’d think such
a little mind
would be lonely
in such a big
head.
If ignorance is
bliss, you must
be the happiest
person alive.
She doesn’t know
the meaning of the
word “fear,” but
then again, she
doesn’t know the
meaning of most
words.
The IQ and
the life
expectancy of
the average
man recently
passed
each other
in opposite
directions.
How do you keep an
idiot in suspense?
Leave a message
and I’ll get back
to you.
Some people drink
from the fountain
of knowledge—it
appears that you
just gargled.
Don’t
hesitate to
speak
your mind ...
you have
nothing to
lose.
Music, Drama, and Visual Art
Gee, what a terrific party. Later on we’ll get some fluid and embalm each other.
—NEIL SIMON
AH, ARTISTS ... PRIMA DONNAS, egotists, crybabies, horror shows, backstabbers, megalomaniacs... and those are the good ones. A good snarkist can always learn from these folks. They never hold back. Behold and marvel.
Nothing seems to give its participants the kind of carte blanche to behave any way they want more than the arts ... as if being an “artist” is a passport to not having to obey the rules the rest of us mere mortals have to ... so when they fight among themselves, sit back, grab a glass of your favorite libation, and let the games begin.
What you said hurt me very much.
I cried all the way to the bank.
—LIBERACE
He’s a male chauvinistic piglet. —BETTY FRIEDAN ON GROUCHO MARX
If you really want to help the American theater, darling, be an audience.
—TALLULAH BANKHEAD TO A YOUNG ACTRESS
She had much in common with Hitler, only no mustache.
—NOËL COWARD
When George Gershwin died in 1937, there were many musical tributes written in praise of the great composer. One of his fans persuaded his friend, Oscar Levant, to hear his own composition. Levant listened to the piece and then told the proud composer: “I think it would have been better if you had died and Gershwin had written the elegy.”
When you enter a room, you have to kiss his ring.
I don’t mind, but he has it in his back pocket.
—DON RICKLES ON FRANK SINATRA
Boy George is just what England needs—another queen who can’t dress.
—JOAN RIVERS
I had no idea Stravinsky disliked Debussy as much as this.