non fiction
1 min
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Literary Barbs
Valerie Hotchkiss
Valerie Hotchkiss is head librarian and professor of English and Book Studies at Oberlin College. She has written several books on cultural history in areas such as medieval transvestism (Clothes Make the Man), doctrinal history, and the history of books and printing. She is now writing more fiction and currently working on a novella, a screenplay, and a fictional non-fiction book.
On the boast of writer Jack Kerouac, who claimed that he never re-read a manuscript after having once put words on paper, Truman Capote quipped: "that's not writing, that's typing."
Oscar Wilde on Henry James: "Mr. James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty."
Mark Twain on Poe and Austen: "To me Edgar Allan Poe's]prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read Poe's prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death."
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