insults about famous men

Excellent put-downs about famous men

He is racist, he's homophobic, he's xenophobic and he's a sexist. He's the perfect Republican candidate.
- - - Bill Press (about Pat Buchanan)

A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.
- - - Benjamin Disraeli (about William Gladstone)

He had a charisma that must have come out of an immaculate conception between Fidel Castro and Groucho Marx. They went into his soul and he came out looking like an ethnic milkshake--Jewish revolutionary, Puerto Rican lord, Italian street kid, Black Panther with the old Afro haircut, even a glint of Irish gunman in the mad, green eyes.
- - - Norman Mailer (about Abbie Hoffman, 1989)

Any political party that can't cough up anything better than a treacherous brain-damaged old vulture like Hubert Humphrey deserves every beating it gets. They don't hardly make 'em like Hubert any more - but just to be on the safe side, he should be castrated anyway.
- - - Hunter S. Thompson (about Hubert Humphrey, 1973)

He sits there in senile dementia with a gangrene heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all things that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy ... disgraceful, depraved ... and putrescent.
- - - Hiram Johnson (about Harrison Grey Otis)

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 (about Oscar Wilde, 1882)

Face to face confrontations between famous men

Oh my God, look at you. Anyone else hurt in the accident?
- - - Don Rickles (to Ernest Borgnine)

Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend - if you have one.
- - - George Bernard Shaw (to Winston Churchill)
Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend second - if there is one.
- - - Churchill's reply

Don't be so humble, you're not that great.
- - - Golda Meir (to Moshe Dayan)

Do you mind if I sit back a little? Because your breath is very bad.
- - - Donald Trump (to Larry King)

I'm not having points taken off me by an incompetent old fool. You're the pits of the world.
- - - John McEnroe (to tennis judge Edward James)

You can't see as well as these fucking flowers - and they're fucking plastic.
- - - John McEnroe (to a line judge)

What other problems do you have besides being unemployed, a moron and a dork?
- - - John McEnroe (to a spectator at a tennis match)

You're like a pay toilet, aren't you? You don't give a shit for nothing.
- - - Howard Hughes (to Robert Mitchum)

Who picks your clothes - Stevie Wonder?
- - - Don Rickles (to David Letterman on 02/5/96 "Late Show")

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
- - - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?
- - - Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)

He's phony, using his blackness to get his way.
- - - Joe Frazier (about Muhammad Ali)
Joe Frazier is so ugly he should donate his face to the US Bureau of Wildlife.
- - - Muhammad Ali

His writing is limited to songs for dead blondes.
- - - Keith Richards (about Elton John)
I'm glad I've given up drugs and alcohol. It would be awful to be like Keith Richards. He's pathetic. It's like a monkey with arthritis, trying to go on stage and look young. I have great respect for the Stones but they would have been better if they had thrown Keith out 15 years ago.
- - - Elton John (about Keith Richards)

If I were married to you, I'd put poison in your coffee.
- - - Lady Astor (to Winston Churchill)
If you were my wife, I'd drink it.
- - - Winston Churchill, in reply

You will either die on the gallows or of a loathsome disease.
- - - John Montague (to John Wilkes)
That depends on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.
- - - John Wilkes, in reply

Do you mind if I smoke?
- - - Oscar Wilde (to Sarah Bernhardt)
I don't care if you burn.
- - - Sarah Bernhardt, in reply

My dear Whistler, you leave your pictures in such a sketchy, unfinished state. Why don't you ever finish them?
- - - Frederic Leighton (to James McNeill Whistler)
My dear Leighton, why do you ever begin yours?
- - - James McNeill Whistler, in reply

Insulting comments about famous actors

He's the type of man who will end up dying in his own arms.
- - - Mamie Van Doren (about Warren Beatty)

You're so vain. You probably think this song is about you.
- - - Carly Simon (about Warren Beatty)

The only reason he had a child is so that he can meet babysitters.
- - - David Letterman (about Warren Beatty, 1991)

What makes him think a middle-aged actor, who's played with a chimp, could have a future in politics?
- - - Ronald Reagan (about Clint Eastwood running for mayor of Carmel)

Most of the time he sounds like he has a mouth full of wet toilet paper.
- - - Rex Reed (about Marlon Brando)

He couldn't ad-lib a fart after a baked-bean dinner.
- - - Johnny Carson (about Chevy Chase)

He acts like he's got a Mixmaster up his ass and doesn't want anyone to know it.
- - - Marlon Brando (about Montgomery Clift)

He got a reputation as a great actor by just thinking hard about the next line.
- - - King Vidor (about Gary Cooper)

I've got three words for him: Am. A. Teur.
- - - Charlie Sheen (about Colin Farrell)

His ears made him look like a taxicab with both doors open.
- - - Howard Hughes (about Clark Gable)

Steve Martin has basically one joke and he's it.
- - - Dave Felton

Nothing happens. At all. Ever. Remember when Steve Martin was funny? Apparently, neither does he.
- - - Robert Wilonsk (about the movie, Cheaper by the Dozen)

Now there sits a man with an open mind. You can feel the draft from here.
- - - Groucho Marx (about Chico Marx)

There were three things that Chico was always on - a phone, a horse, or a broad.
- - - Groucho Marx (about his brother, Chico)

He looked like a half-melted rubber bulldog.
- - - John Simon (about Walter Matthau)

His features resembled a fossilized wash rag.
- - - Alan Brien (about Steve McQueen)

He has turned almost alarmingly blond - he's gone past platinum, he must be plutonium; his hair is coordinated with his teeth.
- - - Pauline Kael (about Robert Redford)

Poor little man, they made him out of lemon Jell-O and there he is. He's honest and hardworking but he's not great.
- - - Adela Rogers St. John (about Robert Redford)

Well at least he has finally found his true love … what a pity he can't marry himself.
- - - Frank Sinatra (about Robert Redford)

Stars The Rock, but The Wood might be a better description of his performance.
- - - Peter Rainer (about wrestler turned actor, The Rock, in the movie, Walking Tall)

His favorite exercise is climbing tall people.
- - - Phyllis Diller (about Mickey Rooney)

Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a condom full of walnuts.
- - - Clive James

He has the vocal modulation of a railway-station announcer, the expressive power of a fence-post and the charisma of a week-old head of lettuce.
- - - Fintan O'Toole, film critic, (about Quentin Tarantino)

Insulting comments about famous athletes

McEnroe was as charming as always, which means that he was as charming as a dead mouse in a loaf of bread.
- - - Clive James (about John McEnroe)

Beyond the hair, tattoos and earrings, he's just like you and me.
- - - Bob Hill (about Dennis Rodman, 1995)

Dennis has become like a prostitute, but now it's gotten ridiculous, to the point where he will do anything humanly possible to make money.
- - - Charles Barkley (about Dennis Rodman, 1997)

He has so many fish hooks in his nose, he looks like a piece of bait.
- - - Bob Costas (about Dennis Rodman)

Insulting comments about famous musicians

I love his work but I couldn't warm to him even if I was cremated next to him.
- - - Keith Richards (about Chuck Berry)

I think Mick Jagger would be astounded and amazed if he realized to how many people he is not a sex symbol but a mother image.
- - - David Bowie

He sings like he's throwing up.
- - - Andrew O'Connor (about Bryan Ferry)

The instant asphalt Elvis from Philadelphia.
- - - Fred Schuers (about Fabian)

Boy George is all England needs - another queen who can't dress.
- - - Joan Rivers

Michael Jackson was a poor black boy who grew up to be a rich white woman.
- - - Molly Ivins

Michael Jackson's album was only called "Bad" because there wasn't enough room on the sleeve for "Pathetic."
- - - The Artist Formerly Known as Prince (about Michael Jackson)

Fame has sent a number of celebrities off the deep end, and in the case of Michael Jackson, to the kiddy pool.
- - - Bill Maher (about Michael Jackson, 1994)

He hasn't just lost the plot, he's lost the whole library!
- - - Melody Maker (about Michael Jackson, 1992)

He now looks like a Barbie doll that has been whittled at by a malicious brother.
- - - Thomas Sutcliffe (about Michael Jackson, 1993)

With his womanly voice, stark white skin and Medusa hair, his gash of red lipstick, heavy eyeliner, almost nonexistent nose and lopsided face, Jackson was making his TV appearance in order to scotch all rumors that he is not quite normal.
- - - Craig Brown (about Michael Jackson, The Times of London, 1993)

He moves like a parody between a majorette girl and Fred Astaire.
- - - Truman Capote (about Mick Jagger)

He sounds like he's got a brick dangling from his willy, and a food-mixer making purée of his tonsils.
- - - Paul Lester (about Jon Bon Jovi)

Pamela Lee said her name is tattooed on her husband's penis. Which explains why she changed her name from Anderson to Lee.
- - - Conan O'Brien (about Tommy Lee)

He could be a maneuvering swine, which no one ever realized.
- - - Paul McCartney (about John Lennon)

A deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, mincing heap of mother love.
- - - William Connor (about Liberace)

He has become the oldest living cute boy in the world.
- - - Anna Quindlen (about Paul McCartney)

Sleeping with George Michael would be like having sex with a groundhog.
- - - Boy George

When you talk to him, he looks at you and grins and grins and nods and nods and appears to be the world's best listener, until you realize he is not listening at all.
- - - Larry L. King (about Willie Nelson)

He sang like a hinge.
Ethel Merman (about Cole Porter)

Elvis transcends his talent to the point of dispensing with it altogether.
- - - Greil Marcus (about Elvis Presley, 1976)

Presley sounded like Jayne Mansfield looked - blowsy and loud and low.
- - - Julie Burchill (about Elvis Presley)

Bambi with testosterone.
- - - Owen Gleiberman (about Prince, 1990)

He looks like a dwarf who's been dipped in a bucket of pubic hair.
- - - Boy George (about Prince, 1986)

Even the deaf would be traumatized by prolonged exposure to the most hideous croak in Western culture. Richards's voice is simply horrible.
- - - Nick Coleman (about Keith Richards)

He plays four-and-a-half-hour sets. That's torture. Does he hate his audience?
- - - John Lydon (about Bruce Springsteen)

He was so mean it hurt him to go to the bathroom.
- - - Britt Eklund (about Rod Stewart)

'Slavic March' -- "One feels that the composer must have made a bet, for all his professional reputation was worth, that he would write the most hideous thing that had ever been put on paper, and he won it, too.
- - - Boston Evening Transcript (about Tchaikovsky, 1883)

I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.
- - - Charles Baudelaire (about Richard Wagner)

Wagner was a monster. He was anti-Semitic on Mondays and vegetarian on Tuesdays. On Wednesday he was in favor of annexing Newfoundland, Thursday he wanted to sink Venice, and Friday he wanted to blow up the pope.
- - - Tony Palmer (about Richard Wagner)

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
- - - Edgar Wilson "Bill" Nye

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes.
- - - Aaron Copland

Insulting comments about famous politicians

History buffs probably noted the reunion at a Washington party a few weeks ago of three ex-presidents: Carter, Ford, and Nixon -- See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Evil.
- - - Robert J. Dole, speech, 1983

George Bush

A pin-stripin' polo-playin' umbrella-totin' Ivy-leaguer, born with a silver spoon so far in his mouth that you couldn't get it out with a crowbar.
- - - Bill Baxley (about George Bush)

He can't help it - he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.
- - - Ann Richards (about George Bush)

He' a Boy Scout with a hormone imbalance.
- - - Kevin Phillips (about George Bush)

If ignorance ever goes to $40 a barrel, I want drilling rights on George Bush's head.
- - - Jim Hightower, 1988

GeorgeW. Bush

George W. Bush is like a bad comic working the crowd. A moron, if you'll pardon the expression.
- - - Martin Sheen

Jimmy Carter

He is your typical smiling, brilliant, back-stabbing, bullshitting southern nut-cutter.
- - - Lane Kirkland (about Jimmy Carter)

Winston Churchill

He has devoted the best years of his life to preparing his impromptu speeches.
- - - F. E. Smith (about Winston Churchill)

He is a man suffering from petrified adolescence.
- - - Aneurin Bevan (about Winston Churchill)

He would kill his own mother just so that he could use her skin to make a drum to beat his own praises.
- - - Margot Asquith (about Winston Churchill)

I thought he was a young man of promise; but it appears he was a young man of promises.
- - - Arthur Balfour (about Winston Churchill)

Winston has devoted the best years of his life to preparing his impromptu speeches.
- - - F. E. Smith (about Winston Churchill)

Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton's foreign policy experience is pretty much confined to having had breakfast once at the International House of Pancakes.
- - - Pat Buchanan

I'm just sick and tired of presidents who jog. Remember, if Bill Clinton wins, we're going to have another four years of his white thighs flapping in the wind.
- - - Arianna Huffington, 1995

When I was president, I said I was a Ford, not a Lincoln. Well what we have now is a convertible Dodge.
- - - Gerald Ford (about Bill Clinton, 1996)

President Clinton apparently gets so much action that every couple of weeks they have to spray WD-40 on his zipper.
- - - David Letterman, 1998

Clinton is a man who thinks international affairs means dating a girl from out of town.
- - - Tom Clancy, 1998

Bob Dole

When he does smile, he looks as if he's just evicted a widow.
- - - Mike Royko (about Bob Dole, 1988)

Gerald Ford

Hark, when Gerald Ford was king--
We were bored with everything.
Unemployment 6 percent,
What a boring president.
Nothing major needed fixin'
So he pardoned Richard Nixon.
- - - Bill Strauss and Eliana Newport, 1982

He is so dumb he can't fart and chew gum at the same time.
- - - Lyndon Baines Johnson (about Gerald Ford)

He's a nice guy, but he played too much football with his helmet off.
- - - Lyndon Baines Johnson (about Gerald Ford)

Lyndon Baines Johnson

He turned out to be so many different characters he could have populated all of War and Peace and still had a few people left over.
- - - Herbert Mitgang (about Lyndon Baines Johnson, 1980)

Richard Nixon

Avoid all needle drugs - the only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon.
- - - Abbie Hoffman (1971)

He bleeds people. He draws every drop of blood and then drops them from a cliff. He'll blame any person he can put his foot on.
- - - Martha Mitchell (about Richard M. Nixon, 1973)

He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them.
- - - James Reston (about Richard Nixon)

He is a shifty-eyed goddamn liar....He's one of the few in the history of this country to run for high office talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying out of both sides.
- - - Harry S Truman (about Richard M. Nixon, 1978)

He was like a kamikaze pilot who keeps apologizing for the attack.
- - - Mary McGrory (about Richard M. Nixon, 1962)

Here is a guy who's had a stake driven through his heart. I mean, really nailed to the bottom of the coffin with a wooden stake, and a silver bullet through the forehead for good measure -- and yet he keeps coming back.
- - - Ted Koppel (about Richard M. Nixon, 1984)

I may not know much, but I know chicken shit from chicken salad.
- - - Lyndon B. Johnson (about a speech by Richard M. Nixon)

I worship the quicksand he walks in.
- - - Art Buchwald (about Richard Nixon)

Nixon's motto was: If two wrongs don't make a right, try three.
- - - Norman Cousins (about Richard M. Nixon)

Sir Richard-the-Chicken-Hearted.
- - - Hubert H. Humphrey (about Richard M. Nixon)

Dan Quayle

Dan Quayle is more stupid than Ronald Reagan put together.
- - - Matt Groening, 1993

If life were fair, Dan Quayle would be making a living asking, "Do you want fries with that?"
- - - John Cleese

Ronald Reagan

A triumph of the embalmer's art.
- - - Gore Vidal (about Ronald Reagan)

Compared to the Clintons, Reagan is living proof that a Republican with half a brain is better than a Democrat with two.
- - - P.J. O'Rourke,1997

He doesn't die his hair - he's just prematurely orange.
- - - Gerald Ford (about Ronald Reagan)

He doesn't die his hair, he bleaches his face.
- - - Johnny Carson (about Ronald Reagan)

He has a chance to make somebody move over on Mount Rushmore. He's working for his place on the coins and the postage stamps.
- - - Henry Graff (about Ronald Reagan, 1985)

I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was... an arctic wilderness.
- - - Steve Martin

I think Nancy does most of his talking; you'll notice that she never drinks water when Ronnie speaks.
- - - Robin Williams (about Ronald Reagan)

In the heat of a political lifetime, he innocently squirrels away tidbits of misinformation and then, sometimes years later, casually drops them into his public discourse, like gum balls in a quiche.
- - - Lucy Howard (about Ronald Reagan 1985)

People say satire is dead. It's not dead; it's alive and living in the White House. He makes a Macy's Thanksgiving Day float look ridiculous. I think he's slowly but surely regressing into movies again. In his mind he's looking at dailies, playing dailies over and over.
- - - Robin Williams (about Ronald Reagan, 1988)

The youthful sparkle in his eyes is caused by his contact lenses, which he keeps highly polished.
- - - Sheila Graham (about Ronald Reagan)

Washington could not tell a lie; Nixon could not tell the truth; Reagan cannot tell the difference.
- - - Mort Sahl

Other Politicians

It has been the political career of this man to begin with hypocrisy, proceed with arrogance, and finish with contempt.
- - - Thomas Paine (about John Adams)

A nonentity with side whiskers.
- - - Woodrow Wilson (about Chester A. Arthur)

One could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole on the air.
- - - George Orwell (about Stanley Baldwin)

He has the lucidity which is the byproduct of a fundamentally sterile mind.
- - - Aneurin Bevan (about Neville Chamberlain)

Dangerous as an enemy, untrustworthy as a friend, but fatal as a colleague.
- - - Sir Hercules Robinson (about Joseph Chamberlain)

He looks as though he's been weaned on a pickle.
- - - Alice Roosevelt Longworth (about Calvin Coolidge)

How can they tell?
- - - Dorothy Parker (hearing of Calvin Coolidge's death)

He's the only man able to walk under a bed without hitting his head.
- - - Walter Winchell (about Thomas E. Dewey)

You really have to get to know him to dislike him.
- - - James T. Patterson (about Thomas E. Dewey)

He is just about the nastiest little man I've ever known. He struts sitting down.
- - - Lillian Dykstra (about Thomas E. Dewey)

Like the little man on top of the wedding cake.
- - - Source questionable, either: Walter Winchell, Ethel Barrymore, or Grace Hodgson Flandrau (about Thomas E. Dewey, 1944)

The Wizard of Ooze.
- - - John F. Kennedy (about Everett Dirksen)

Why, this fellow don't know any more about politics than a pig knows about Sunday.
- - - Harry S Truman (about Dwight D. Eisenhower)

Oh, if I could piss the way he speaks!
- - - Georges Clemenceau (about David Lloyd George)

It was hard to listen to Goldwater and realize that a man could be half Jewish and yet sometimes appear twice as dense as the normal Gentile.
- - - I. F. Stone (about Barry Goldwater, 1968)

His speeches left the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea.
- - - William McAdoo (about Warren Harding)

His writing is rumble and bumble, flap and doodle, balder and dash.
- - - H. L. Mencken (about Warren Harding)

He wouldn't commit himself to the time of day from a hatful of watches.
- - - Westbrook Pegler (about Herbert Hoover)

Such a little man could not have made so big a depression.
- - - Norman Thomas (about Herbert Hoover)

The hustler from Chicago.
- - - George Bush (about Jesse Jackson, 1988)

We know that he has, more than any other man, the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought.
- - - Winston Churchill (about Ramsay MacDonald)

He has no more backbone than a chocolate eclair.
- - - Louise Lamprey (about President McKinley, 1897)

The right honorable and learned gentleman has twice crossed the floor of this House, each time leaving behind a trail of slime.
- - - David Lloyd George (about Sir John Simon)

Canada has at last produced a political leader worthy of assassination.
- - - Irving Layton (about Pierre Trudeau)

To err is Truman.
- - - A popular joke in 1946

Insults about famous writers

He is all ice and wooden faced acrobatics.
- - - Percy Wyndham Lewis (about Wystan Hugh Auden)

His verse . . . is the beads without the string.
- - - Gerard Manley Hopkins (about Robert Browning)

He is mad, bad and dangerous to know.
- - - Lady Caroline Lamb (about Lord Byron)

The world is rid of him, but the deadly slime of his touch remains.
- - - John Constable (about the death of Lord Byron)

A great zircon in the diadem of American literature.
- - - Gore Vidal (about Truman Capote)

He's a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.
- - - Gore Vidal (about Truman Capote)

Truman Capote's death was a good career move.
- - - Gore Vidal

A huge pendulum attached to a small clock.
- - - Ivan Panin (about Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

His imagination resembles the wings of an ostrich.
- - - Thomas Babington Macaulay (about John Dryden)

T. S. Eliot and I like to play, but I like to play euchre, while he likes to play Eucharist.
- - - Robert Frost (about T. S. Eliot)

Even those who call Mr. Faulkner our greatest literary sadist do not fully appreciate him, for it is not merely his characters who have to run the gauntlet but also his readers.
- - - Clifton Fadiman (about William Faulkner)

He uses a lot of big words, and his sentences are from here to the airport.
- - - Carolyn Chute (about William Faulkner)

He was a great friend of mine. Well, as much as you could be a friend of his, unless you were a fourteen-year-old nymphet.
- - - Truman Capote (about William Faulkner)

Fitzgerald never got rid of anything; the ghosts of his adolescence, the failures of his youth, the doubts of his maturity plagued him to the end. He was supremely a part of the world he described, so much a part that he made himself its king and then, when he saw it begin to crumble, he crumbled with it and led it to death.
- - - John Aldridge (about F. Scott Fitzgerald)

An animated adenoid.
- - - Norman Douglas (about Ford Maddox Ford)

A nice, acrid, savage, pathetic old chap.
- - - I. A. Richards (about Robert Frost)

Gibbon is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow and poisons our literary club for me. I class him among infidel wasps and venomous insects.
- - - James Boswell (about Edward Gibbon)

He walked as if he had fouled his small clothes and looks as if he smelt it.
- - - Christopher Smart (about Thomas Gray)

Always willing to lend a helping hand to the one above him.
- - - F. Scott Fitzgerald (about Ernest Hemingway)

The stupid person's idea of the clever person.
- - - Elizabeth Bowen (about Aldous Huxley)

He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.
- - - T. S. Eliot (about Henry James)

A little emasculated mass of inanity.
- - - Theodore Roosevelt (about Henry James)

I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
- - - Virginia Woolf (about Henry James)

He spares no resource in telling of his dead inventions... Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits infinitives and fills them up with adverbial stuffing. He presses the passing colloquialism into his service. His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle; they could not sweat and elbow and struggle more if God Himself was the processional meaning to which they sought to come.
- - - H. G. Wells (about Henry James)

Reading him is like wading through glue.
- - - Alfred, Lord Tennyson (about Ben Johnson)

There is no arguing with Johnson; for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.
- - - Oliver Goldsmith (about Samuel Johnson)

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 (about James Joyce, 1928)

That's not writing, that's typing.
- - - Truman Capote (about Jack Kerouac's style)

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 (about D. H. Lawrence)

There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.
- - - Oscar Wilde (about Alexander Pope)

Some call Pope little nightingale - all sound and no sense.
- - - Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (about Alexander Pope)

He was humane but not human.
- - - e e Cummings (about Ezra Pound)

To me Pound remains the exquisite showman without the show.
- - - Ben Hecht (about Ezra Pound)

He is able to turn an unplotted, unworkable manuscript into an unplotted and unworkable manuscript with a lot of sex.
- - - Tom Volpe (about Harold Robbins)

The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.
- - - Edmund Wilson

A freakish homunculus germinated outside lawful procreation.
- - - Henry Arthur Jones (about George Bernard Shaw)

He writes his plays for the ages--the ages between five and twelve.
- - - George Nathan (about George Bernard Shaw)

Sitting in a sewer and adding to it.
- - - Thomas Carlyle (about Algernon Charles Swinburne)

A dirty man with opium-glazed eyes and rat-taily hair.
- - - Lady Frederick Cavendish (about Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

A tall, thin, spectacled man with the face of a harassed rat.
- - - Russell Maloney (about James Thurber)

That insolent little ruffian, that crapulous lout. When he quitted a sofa, he left behind him a smear.
- - - Norman Cameron (about Dylan Thomas)

A large shaggy dog unchained scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.
- - - Robert Louis Stevenson (about Walt Whitman)

Oscar Wilde's talent seems to me to be essentially rootless, something growing in glass on a little water.
- - - George Moore (about Oscar Wilde)

Dank, limber verses, stuft with lakeside sedges
And propt with rotten stakes from rotten hedges.
- - - Walter Savage Landor (about William Wordsworth)

Insulting comments about miscellaneous men

He couldn't Master Mind an electric bulb into a socket.
- - - Fanny Brice (about her husband Nick Arnstein)

A fat little flabby person, with the face of a baker, the clothes of a cobbler, the size of a barrel maker, the manners of a stocking salesman, and the dress of an innkeeper.
- - - Victor de Balabin (about Honoré de Balzac)

A monstrous orchid.
- - - Oscar Wilde (about Aubrey Beardsley)

An enchanting toad of a man.
- - - Helen Hayes (about Robert Benchley)

When he has a party, you not only bring your own scotch, you bring your own rocks.
- - - George Burns (about Jack Benny)

He's done everybody's act. He's a parrot with skin on.
- - - Fred Allen (about Milton Berle)

His mind was like a soup dish, wide and shallow; it could hold a small amount of nearly anything, but the slightest jarring spilled the soup into somebody's lap.
- - - Irving Stone (about William Jennings Bryan)

He's an anesthetist - Prince Valium.
- - - Mort Sahl (about Johnny Carson)

He is, like almost all the eminent men of this country, only half educated. His morals, public and private, are loose.
- - - John Quincy Adams (about Henry Clay)

The biggest bug in the manure pile.
- - - Elia Kazan (about Harry Cohn)

The only time he opens his mouth is to change feet.
- - - David Feherty (about Nick Faldo)

Gone With the Wind is going to be the biggest flop in Hollywood history. I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling flat on his face and not Gary Cooper.
- - - Gary Cooper (after he turned down the role of Rhett Butler)

He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great.
- - - Samuel Johnson (about Thomas Gray)

He has all the characteristics of a dog except loyalty.
- - - Sam Houston (about Thomas Jefferson Green)

He's thin boys. He's thin as piss on a hot rock.
- - - William F. Jenner (about Averell Harriman)

. . . a pig, an ass, a dunghill, the spawn of an adder, a basilisk, a lying buffoon, a mad fool with a frothy mouth.
- - - Martin Luther (about Henry VIII)

The plain truth is, that he was a most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the history of England.
- - - Charles Dickens (about Henry VIII)

A cherub's face, a reptile all the rest.
- - - Alexander Pope (about Lord Hervey)

If brains was lard, Jethro couldn't grease a pan.
- - - Jed Clampett (from "The Beverly Hillbillies")

The General is suffering from mental saddle sores.
- - - Harold L. Ickes (about Hugh S. Johnson)

His pictures seem to resemble not pictures but a sample book of patterns of linoleum.
- - - Cyril Asquith (about Paul Klee)

A character who, if he had not existed, could not be imagined.
- - - S. N. Behrman (about Oscar Levant)

He is suffering from halitosis of the intellect. That's presuming he has intellect.
- - - Harold Ickes (about Huey Long)

I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it shall be behind me.
- - - Max Reger (letter to critic Rudolph Louis, 1906)

Never trust a man who combs his hair straight from his left armpit.
- - - Alice Roosevelt Longworth (about Douglas MacArthur)

He has a face like a warthog that has been stung by a wasp.
- - - David Feherty (about Colin Montgomerie)

In defeat he was unbeatable; in victory, unbearable.
- - - Edward Marsh (about B. L. Montgomery)

An agile but unintelligent and abnormal German, possessed of the mania of grandeur.
- - - Leo Tolstoy (about Friedrich Nietzsche)

He has committed every crime that does not require courage.
- - - Benjamin Disraeli (about Daniel O'Connell)

If he were any dumber, he'd be a tree.
- - - Barry Goldwater (about William Scott)

- - - Ninon de Lenclos (about the Marquis de Sevigne)

A man who so much resembled a Baked Alaska - sweet, warm and gungy on the outside, hard and cold within.
- - - Joseph O'Connor (about C. P. Snow)

His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.
- - - Edmund Wilson (about Evelyn Waugh)

The only genius with an IQ of 60.
- - - Gore Vidal (about Andy Warhol)

Every drop of blood in that man's veins has eyes that look downward.
- - - Ralph Waldo Emerson (about Daniel Webster)

He looked like something that had gotten loose from Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
- - - Harpo Marx (about Alexander Woollcott)

From Poland to Polo in one generation.
- - - Arthur Caesar (about Darryl Zanuck)

The triumph of sugar over diabetes.
- - - George Nathan (about J. M. Barrie)