“Yesterday was my Birth Day,” Coleridge wrote in his notebook in 1804, when he was thirty-two. “So completely has a whole year passed, with scarcely the fruits of a month.—O Sorrow and Shame. . . . I have done nothing!”

I do feel compelled to share this link from my procrastination: The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults in History.

This one is pretty good:

20. Vladimir Nabokov on Joseph Conrad

“I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches.”

And these:

15. William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

14. Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

And this:

12. Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope

“There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”

And just one more, because Mark Twain is so funny and Jane Austen so demure:

4. Mark Twain on Jane Austen (1898)

“I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”