Dorfman - The Snark Handbook: Comebacks, Taunts, and Effronteries

S O I SAY UNTO thee, snark! And it will set you free!

(Always wanted to do that ... you know ... in a big voice like those preachers that dress like pimps? Falwell and those guys...)

Is there anything weve learned here? Yeah, theres a lot of people with huge bugs up their asses, no? Including yours truly....

The difference is in finding a way to channel that angst and anger at the time and come back quickly with just the perfect amount of snark in your voice and words. It will set you free. Or send you to prison.

Say hey to Bubba for me.

Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.

JONATHAN SWIFT

THE LITERATI TEND TO be more cultured... but not a whole lot more. More often than not, they say in a multitude of sentences what should be said to better effect in one or two. Most expel more wind than a hot-air balloon.

The quotes here are where the so-called best and brightest hold forth and let the vitriol fly. Clearly, book learning doesnt mean a better class of people. Some of these are downright evil. Cant wait, huh? Good stuff... and all very usable in day-to-day verbal combat.

Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.

A. E. HOUSMAN

Ordinarily he is insane. But he has lucid moments when he is only stupid.

HEINRICH HEINE

She and her sex had better mind the kitchen and her children; and perhaps the poor; except in such things as little novels, they only devote themselves to what men do much better, leaving that which men do worse or not at all.

EDWARD FITZGERALD ON ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

NORMAN MAILER

Everywhere I go Im asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they dont stifle enough of them.

FLANNERY OCONNOR

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

KURT VONNEGUT

Edna Ferber, one of the brightest lights in the New York Algonquin Round Table Group of the twenties and thirties, had a penchant for wearing elegantly tailored suits, trousers and all. Nol Coward met her one day in New York when he was wearing a suit very similar to the one Miss Ferber was sporting. Edna, you look almost like a man, he told her. So do you, she answered.

He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.

HENRY JAMES

Youre a mouse studying to be a rat.

WILSON MIZNER

Match the Criticism to the Book

1. Paradise Lost

   (John Milton)

2. Three Lives

   (Gertrude Stein)

3. Moby-Dick

   (Herman Melville)

4. Uncle Toms Cabin

   (Harriet Beecher Stowe)

5. Franny and Zooey

   (J. D. Salinger)

6. A Man in Full

   (Tom Wolfe)

1. Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste... Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!D. H. Lawrence
2. A cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through and all along.Wyndham Lewis
3. The book has gas and runs out of gas, fills up again, goes dry. It is a 742-page work that reads as if it is fifteen hundred pages long....Norman Mailer
4. One of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.Samuel Johnson
5. So youre the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.Abraham Lincoln
6. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality and its so narcissistic... so false, so calculated. Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egotism. I simply cant stand it.Mary McCarthy

Mr. Huxley is perhaps one of those people who have to perpetrate thirty bad novels before producing a good one.

T. S. ELIOT ON ALDOUS HUXLEY

He knows so little and knows it so fluently.

ELLEN GLASGOW

He looked as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

RAYMOND CHANDLER

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

A flabby lemon and pink giant, who hung his mouth open as though he were an animal at the zoo inviting bunsespecially when the ladies were present.

WYNDHAM LEWIS ON FORD MADOX FORD