Enjoy witty responses and retorts that they’ve outlived the person who delivered them:
I 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
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)
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)
Do you mind if I smoke?
Oscar Wilde (to Sarah Bernhardt)
I don’t care if you burn.
Sarah Bernhardt, in reply
There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.
Oscar Wilde (about Alexander Pope)
He writes his plays for the ages between five and twelve.
George Nathan (about George Bernard Shaw)
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 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)
