Literature’s greatest wits and greatest hits
The funniest literary witticisms, author on author insults, cutting comebacks and savage book reviews.
You’ll find more funny writing quotes in our collections on playwrights, screenwriters and the incomparable Dorothy Parker.
In this collection:
How writing works: writers on writing, readers and publishing
Genres: the novel, biography, poetry, criticism and journalism
Author on author insults: literary disses, self-deprecation and feuds
Aspects of the insult: personal attacks, backhanded jabs, one-liners and name-calling
Bad book reviews: scathing critiques of classic and not-so-classic books
When writers go wrong: ill-informed, long-winded and light-fingered authors
How writing works: funny quotes on the nature of literary endeavour
In which authors take the piss out of their calling and those who make it possible.
Writers and the writing process
Our collection of funny writing quotes opens where it all starts, with a writer sitting down to write. How hard can that be?
“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”
Mark Twain
“Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”
Gene Fowler
“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
E.L. Doctorow
“A writer is a man who finds writing more difficult than other men.”
Thomas Mann
Why writers write
Here are some sardonic quotes on the itches that writing scratches.
“No one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”
Samuel Johnson
“The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.”
Robert Benchley
“Like a whore, I did it first for my own pleasure, then for the pleasure of my friends, and now I do it for money.”
Ferenc Molnár on writing
“Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.”
Jules Renard
“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”
Cyril Connolly
“I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.”
D. H. Lawrence
“If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, there’s little point in writing.”
Kingsley Amis
Literary skills and technique
The craft behind the creativity is the focus of these next funny writing quotes.
“I’m not very good at it myself, but the first rule about spelling is that there is only one z in is.”
George S. Kaufman
“When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.”
Raymond Chandler
“When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”
Raymond Chandler
“He is able to turn an unplotted, unworkable manuscript into an unplotted and unworkable manuscript with a lot of sex.”
Tom Volpe on Harold Robbins
“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.”
Ernest Hemingway
“Abridgement, n. A brief summary of some person’s literary work, in which those parts that tell against the convictions of the abridger are omitted for want of space.”
Ambrose Bierce
The reading public and other supporters
Without readers, writers are doodling in the dark. But authors’ attitudes to their audience is not always one of unvarnished admiration.
“The human race, to which so many of my readers belong.”
G.K. Chesterton
“Wanting to meet a writer because you like their books is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”
Margeret Atwood
“If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that’s read by persons who move their lips when they’re reading to themselves.”
Don Marquis
“I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.”
William Lyon Phelps
“Once upon a time a chap in Virginia, I believe it was, pressed me publicly on the recurrence of adulterous triangles in my early novels. Had I myself been a vertex in such a triangle? ‘Only once,’ I told him, ‘With your mother’.”
John Barth
“In America, only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, and in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.”
Geoffrey Cottrell
“Patron: n.s. One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.”
Samuel Johnson
The publishing industry
A whole industry has sprung up to bring readers to writing. Funny quotes like these poke fun at the people who make it possible.
“An editor should have a pimp for a brother, so he’d have someone to look up to.”
Gene Fowler
“One day we shall strangle the last publisher with the entrails of the last literary agent.”
David Mercer
“If you don’t touch your face in your author photo, readers might assume you don’t have hands. ‘How did you even write this?’ they’ll say.”
Mike Ingram @mikeingram00 on Twitter (now X)
“There’s no way you’re going to get a quote from us to use on your book cover.”
Metropolitan Police spokesman, quoted on the cover of Banksy’s Wall and Peace
What makes a book a book
Books are an ancient but evolving technology. Our next compendium of funny writing quotes examines the essence of the bookiness.
“Ever realised how fucking surreal reading a book actually is? You stare at marked slices of tree for hours on end, hallucinating vividly”
grumplestiltskin @KatieOldham on Twitter (now X)
“i’m sorry I referred to ‘reading’ as ‘spreading book cheeks’.”
No @flossypremium on Twitter (now X)
“People who prefer e-books think that books merely take up space. This is true, but so do your children and Prague and the Sistine Chapel.”
Joe Queenan
“Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.”
Douglas Adams
“I’ve started listening to audiobooks and I have to say it’s much easier than listening to physical books.”
Martin Pilgrim @MartinPilgrim1 on Twitter (now X)
“I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”
Steven Wright
“Get stewed: books are a load of crap.”
Philip Larkin
Genres of writing: funny quotes on literary forms
Writing comes in many styles. Luckily, someone has a bad word to say about most of them.
The novel
There is much debate about who wrote the first novel. If these quotes are anything to go by, they’ve caused nothing but trouble.
“A novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.”
Randall Jarrell
“Every novel should have a beginning, a muddle and an end.”
Peter De Vries
“Novel, n. A short story padded.”
Ambrose Bierce
“There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
W. Somerset Maugham
“I’m never reading another novel unless it begins with ‘A shot rang out’.”
Kingsley Amis
Biography and autobiography
Here are some dead funny quotes about life writing.
“Biography lends to death a new terror.”
Oscar Wilde
“Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.”
Oscar Wilde
“Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.”
Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson,
and probably addressing Boswell himself
“Autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.”
Quentin Crisp
“Autobiography is an unrivalled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.”
Phillip Guedella
“I found nothing really wrong with this autobiography except poor choice of subject.”
Clifton Fadiman on Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography
Poetry and poets
The wealth of funny quotes about poetry and poets suggests there’s a lot of versus in the verses.
“A hyena who wrote poetry in tombs.”
Friedrich Nietzsche on Dante Alighieri
“Tadpole of the Lakes.”
Lord Byron on John Keats
“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”
Lady Caroline Lamb on Lord Byron
“He hardly drank tea without a stratagem.”
Samuel Johnson on Alexander Pope
“Arrived at the supreme eminence among English critics largely through disguising himself as a corpse.”
Ezra Pound on T.S. Eliot
“Stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.”
Dylan Thomas on Rudyard Kipling
“The same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.”
Henry James Sr. on Thomas Carlyle
“Beads without the string.”
Gerard Manley Hopkins on Robert Browning
“A huge pendulum attached to a small clock.”
Ivan Panin on Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.”
Van Wyck Brooks on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Mr Donne’s verses are like the Peace of God, for they pass all understanding.”
James I on John Donne
“Homer taught all other poets the art of telling lies.”
Aristotle
“On Waterloo’s ensanguined plain
Lie tens of thousands of the slain,
But none, by sabre or by shot,
Fell half as flat as Walter Scott.”
Thomas, Lord Erskine on Sir Walter Scott
Criticism and critics
While the many of our funny writing quotes have come from the critics, here they themselves are in the firing line.
“A critic is a man created to praise greater men than himself, but he is never able to find them.”
Richard Le Gallienne
“Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.”
Brendan Behan
“Criticism is prejudice made plausible.”
H.L. Mencken
“A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.”
Murray Kempton
“I never read a book before reviewing it: it prejudices a man so.”
Sydney Smith
Journalism and journalists
Over the years, the press have come in for some bad press, if these funny writing quotes are anything to go by.
“Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature.”
Fran Lebowitz
“The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.”
Don Marquis
“Editor: A person employed on a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.”
Elbert Hubbard
“So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.”
Alan Bennett on Huffington Post founder Arianna Stassinopoulos
“A legend in his own lunchtime.”
Christopher Wordsworth on Observer sports editor Clifford Makins
Author on author insults: funny quotes on literary foes
Writers have a way with words. And when they are fighting words, that’s all the better.
Authors critique their fellow scribblers
Knowing how hard writing can be, when one author assesses the work of another they often tread gently and give the benefit of the doubt. Not these ones though.
“Everytime I read ‘Pride and Prejudice‘ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
Mark Twain on Jane Austen
“This is the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he is profoundly ignorant.”
Thomas Babington Macaulay on Charles Boyle’s Boyle against Bentley
“He’s a second-rate Stephen Birmingham. And Stephen Birmingham is third-rate.”
Truman Capote on Louis Auchincloss
“They inculcate the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master.”
Samuel Johnson on Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son
“His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.”
Edmund Wilson on Evelyn Waugh
“He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”
H.L. Mencken on the work of Warren G. Harding
“Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.”
D.H. Lawrence on James Joyce
“The work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
Virginia Woolf on James Joyce
“I thought nothing of her writing. I considered her a beautiful little knitter.”
Edith Sitwell on Virginia Woolf
“What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.”
Gustave Flaubert on Honoré de Balzac
Authors insult themselves
Many writers are at their most funny when mocking themselves.
“I can write faster than anyone who can write better, and I can write better than anyone who can write faster.”
A. J. Liebling
“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
Douglas Adams
“It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”
Robert Benchley
“I have been told by hospital authorities that more copies of my works are left behind by departing patients than those of any other author.”
Robert Benchley
“If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come.”
Raymond Chandler
“My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water.”
Mark Twain
“My face looks like a wedding cake that has been left out in the rain.”
W.H. Auden
“First I brush my teeth, then I sharpen my tongue.”
Oscar Levant
Told a book of his was even better in French: “Yes, my work tends to lose something in the original.”
James Thurber
Ego and egotists
These author on author insults suggest that one writer’s self-assurance is another’s rampant egomania.
“Emerson’s gaping flaw was the insinuation that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.”
Herman Melville on Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Poor Matt. He’s gone to Heaven, no doubt – but he won’t like God.”
Robert Louis Stevenson on Matthew Arnold
“He had a genius for backing into the limelight.”
Lowell Thomas on T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia)
“An essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognised.”
Tom Stoppard on James Joyce
“An ego that can crack crystal at a distance of twenty feet.”
John Cheever on Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Literary feuds and lightning comebacks
Some of the most famous author insults were delivered off the cuff. Here are some telling ripostes from the cut and thrust of literary debate.
Denise Robins: “I’ve just written my 87th book.”
Barbara Cartland: “I’ve written 145.”
Robins: “Oh I see, one a year.”
Denise Robins to Barbara Cartland
Dame Edith Evans, on hearing that writer Nancy Mitford had been lent a villa so that she could finish her book: “Oh really. What exactly is she reading?”
Edith Evans on Nancy Mitford
Gore Vidal on Truman Capote’s death: “Good career move.”
Gore Vidal on Truman Capote
After a bad review from Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer met Vidal at a party and punched him to the ground. From the floor Vidal said: “Once again, words fail Norman Mailer.”
Gore Vidal on Norman Mailer
William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway: “He 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?”
Ernest Hemingway to William Faulkner
Robert Giroux: “Are most editors failed writers?”
T.S. Eliot: “Perhaps, but so are most writers.”
T.S. Eliot to his publisher Robert Giroux
@sjosiah0: “Fuck off you Labour CUNT. All you lefties are finished in this country, especially you JK bitchface.”
@jk_rowling: “The internet doesn’t just offer opportunities for misogynistic abuse, you know – penis enlargers can also be bought discreetly.”
J.K. Rowling to Steve Josiah on Twitter (now X)
Henry James
While the writings of Henry James earned him much renown, for us his greatest achievement was the scorn he provoked in his peers.
“Once you put it down, you simply can’t pick it up.”
Mark Twain on the work of Henry James
“Mr Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.”
Oscar Wilde
“One of the nicest old ladies I ever met.”
William Faulkner
“He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.”
T. S. Eliot on Henry James
“He chews more than he bites off.”
Marian “Clover” Hooper Adams
“A hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea.”
H.G. Wells
Aspects of the insult: a typology of literary jibes
Let’s look now at four excellent ways to insult authors: personal attacks, backhanded jabs, pithy one-liners and good old-fashioned name-calling.
The personal attack
It could be argued that it is kinder to mock a writer for how they were created than for what they’ve created, since they have more control over the latter. But kindness isn’t always the aim.
“Barbara Cartland’s eyes were twin miracles of mascara and looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.”
Clive James on Barbara Cartland
“Mr. Lawrence looked like a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some suburban garden … He looked as if he had just returned from spending an uncomfortable night in a very dark cave.”
Dame Edith Sitwell on D.H. Lawrence
“Thomas Gray walks as if he had fouled his small-clothes and looks as if he smelt it.”
Christopher Smart
“The gods bestowed on Max the gift of perpetual old age.”
Oscar Wilde on Max Beerbohm
“A bad loser. When worsted in an argument, she throws Queensbury Rules to the winds. She once called me Percy. “
Percy Wyndham Lewis on Edith Sitwell
“He could not blow his nose without moralising on the state of the handkerchief industry.”
Cyril Connolly on George Orwell
“Always willing to lend a helping hand to the one above him.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald on Ernest Hemingway
“Waldo is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.”
Saki on Ralph Waldo Emerson
The backhanded jab
Many of the funniest author insults come in the form of the tongue-in-cheek, the sly and the sarcastic.
“Very nice, though there are dull stretches.”
Antoine de Rivarol reading a couplet
“From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.”
Groucho Marx on S.J. Perelman’s Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge
“This book fills a much needed gap.”
Moses Hadas
“Many thanks for the book – I shall lose no time in reading it.”
Benjamin Disraeli
The witty one-liner
Sometimes when an author insults the work of another they need but a few words.
“The covers of this book are too far apart.”
Ambrose Bierce
“Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”
Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman
“That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac
“Mills and Boon with guns.”
Isabell Wolff on Sebastian Faulks
“Nothing but wind.”
Montaigne on Cicero
Creative name-calling
Here we have a set of insults from authors with a knack for name-calling.
“A great cow full of ink.”
Gustave Flaubert on George Sand
“The pom-pom girl of American Letters.”
Edward Abbey on Tom Wolfe
“The stupid person’s idea of a clever person.”
Elizabeth Bowen on Aldous Huxley
“An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”
H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw
“That hyena in petticoats.”
Horace Walpole on Mary Wollstonecraft
Bad book reviews: funny quotes from scathing critiques
No collection of funny insults from the literary world would be complete without a collection of bad reviews.
Brickbats, catcalls and hatchet jobs
Critics are often at their witty best when they’re giving a book a good bashing.
“This is easily one of the worst books I’ve ever read. And bear in mind that I’ve read John Grisham.”
Susan Cohen on Stig Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
“Clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive.”
Michael Deacon on Dan Brown’s Inferno
“So dense and so dull that time and light seem to bend around it.”
Dwight Garner on Karl One Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book 6
“Goop noir.”
Johanna Thomas-Corr on Lisa Taddeo’s Ghost Lover
“Deeply needless.”
Andrea Long Chu on Bret Easton Ellis’ White
“A book-shaped object made of cardboard and paper.”
J.W. McCormack on Tom Hanks’ Uncommon Type
“Still capable of telling a lie before he’s even finished his Table of Contents.”
Steve Donoghue on Henry Kissinger’s Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy
“Thomas the Wank Engine.”
Private Eye on D.M. Thomas’s Memories and Hallucinations
The classics panned
Even the most famous books have had their fair share of hilariously bad reviews.
“A glorified anecdote.”
H.L. Mencken on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
“Literature of the latrine.”
The Sporting Times on James Joyce’s Ulysses
“Begins nowhere and ends in nothing.”
The Cincinnati Enquirer on Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises
“Gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper.”
The New Yorker on Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
“It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.”
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
“Contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these.”
Field and Stream on D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell by Dickens without laughing.”
Oscar Wilde
Classic online reviews of the classics
The internet has democratised book reviewing, producing these masterpieces of distilled derision.
“Just a bunch of people going to each other’s houses”
mr carlton b morganon reviews Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice on Amazon
“Vile people are mean to one another.
The End”
Jason Koivu reviews Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights on Goodreads
“an annoying scientist and an ugly tall man fight over who is more depressed”
Sara reviews Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein on Goodreads
“This is a great book. Very well written and important.
I hated it.”
Magnus Von Black reviews John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath on Goodreads
“Writing this was a crime and reading it was a punishment.”
Kim reviews Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment on Goodreads
“Shut up James, you had me at ‘moo-cow.'”
Nathan reviews James Joyce’s Ulysses on Goodreads
While Goodreads offers a trove of crowd-sourced reviews and writing quotes, it’s also known for dodgy moderation and locking in the market dominance of its owner Amazon.
When writers go wrong: funny quotes on literary failings
A collection of insults about authors who are either uneducated, unending, unoriginal or all of the above.
Ill-informed authors
Ignorance is dissed in the following quotes on unlettered men and women of letters.
“I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.”
Jane Austen
“Our principle writers have nearly all been fortunate in escaping education.”
Hugh MacDiarmid
“She preserved to the age of 56 that contempt for ideas which is normal among boys and girls of fifteen.”
Odell Shepard on Louisa May Alcott
“Everywhere I go, I am asked if the university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn’t stifle enough of them.”
Flannery O’Connor
Long-winded authors
If you outstay your welcome as an author, insults soon fly from overburdened readers. So avoid redundant, pleonastic, periphrastic tautologies.
“Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?”
William, Duke of Gloucester to Edward Gibbon
“He drew the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.”
Richard Porson on Edward Gibbon
“I am the only one, only one, only one. Only one being, one at the same time. Not two, not three, only one. Only one life to live, only sixty minutes in one hour. Only one pair of eyes. Only one brain. Only one being. Being only one, having only one pair of eyes, having only one time, having only one life, I cannot read your MS three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.”
A.J. Fifield on Gertrude Stein
“A past master at making nothing happen very slowly.”
Clifton Fadiman on Gertrude Stein
“None ever wished it longer than it is.”
Samuel Johnson on John Milton’s Paradise Lost
“A 576-page monument to insignificance.”
B.R. Meyers on Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom
“The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.”
Voltaire
“The cure.”
Dominique Rose @dchacanias sums up Stephen King’s Insomnia on Facebook
Light-fingered authors
In literature, there are a range of positions on how much appropriation is appropriate. But then, as I’ve always said, originality is nothing but judicious imitation.
“Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.”
Voltaire
Oscar Wilde: “How I wish I’d said that.”
James McNeill Whistler: “You will, Oscar, you will.”
James McNeill Whistler to Oscar Wilde
“Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”
Samuel Johnson
“An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.”
François-René de Chateaubriand
“If you copy from one book, that’s plagiarism; if you copy from many books, that’s research.”
Wallace Notestein
“Plagiarize,
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes.
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don’t shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize
Only be sure always to call it please ‘research’.”
Tom Lehrer
“Plagiarism, n. A literary coincidence compounded of a discreditable priority and an honorable subsequence.”
Ambrose Bierce
“Plagiarize, v. To take the thought or style of another writer whom one has never, never read.”
Ambrose Bierce
“Quotation, n. The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.”
Ambrose Bierce