Literary Rivalry Quotes

Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.

Wilkie Collins was a rival and competitor of Dickens. His novel Moonstone sold more copies at the time than Dickens' last two books. But that meant nothing in the long run. Right now, to be honest, Wilkie Collins is what he deserved to be back then: a footnote, an almost lost memory. And he knew he would become that.

An appellate court which reverses the judgment of a popular author's contemporaries, the appellant being his obscure competitor.

Hemingway hated me. I sold 200 million books, and he didn't. Of course most of mine sold for 25 cents, but still... you look at all this stuff with a grain of salt.

A year after Hemingway died on the front page, Faulkner went off after a binge, as if dying was nobody's business but his own.

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

A literary movement: five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other.

The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living.

Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens.

I'm probably better known for boxing with Hemingway than for anything I've written.

Envy's a sharper spur than pay: No author ever spar'd a brother; Wits are gamecocks to one another.

I remember that the single most vicious letter I ever read was the letter Hemingway wrote Scribners when they asked him to give a blurb for From Here to Eternity. It's there, in the Selected Letters for all to read, an example of a once great writer at his very worst. I doubt that he ever forgave Scribners for publishing James Jones in the first place. War, as Hemingway saw it, belonged to him.

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. . . . It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.

When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.

Poets, like whores, are only hated by each other.

A writer of books has to admit that film is the enemy, and that in my case I have been sleeping with the enemy.