FROM ROTTEN REJECTIONS: Actual rejection letters. Great stuff.

(of a book by Harry Crews) “Burn it, son, burn it. Fire is a great refiner.”

(of Faulkner’s Sanctuary) “Good God, I can’t publish this. We’d both be in jail.”

(of Fitzgerald’s “Thumbs Up”) “I thought it was swell but all the femmes down here said it was horrid. The thumbs, I suppose, were too much for them.”

(of The Wind in the Willows) “…the form of the story is most unexpected.”

(two assessments of Henry James; have only read a couple things of his but this sums up my feelings perfectly) “A duller story I have never read. It wanders through a deep mire of affected writing and gets nowhere, tells no tale, stirs no emotion but weariness. The professional critics who mistake an indirect and roundabout use of words for literary art will call it an excellent piece of work; but people who have any blood in their veins will yawn and throw it down–if, indeed, they ever pick it up.”

“It is surely the n+1st power of Jamesiness….It gets decidedly on one’s nerves. It is like trying to make out page after page of illegible writing. The sense of effort becomes acutely exasperating. Your spine curls up, your hair-roots prickle & you want to get up and walk around the block. There is no story–oh! but none at all…”

(of A River Runs Through It) “These stories have trees in them.”

(of Animal Farm) “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.”

(this one is by T.S. Eliot!) “…your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm–in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm without them: so what was needed was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”

(of “Portrait d’une Femme” by Ezra Pound) “The opening lines contain too many ‘r’s.” (This is true–ed.)

(of Remembrance of Things Past) “My dear fellow, I may be dead from the neck up, but rack my brains as I may I can’t see why a chap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep.”

(of a book by Barbara Pym) “Not the kind of thing to which people are turning.”

(of Speck, the Special Sardine, by William Saroyan) “Even if Isaiah, William James, Confucius, Willa Cather and Mickey Spillane were to collaborate on an eleven-page story about a little sardine who didn’t like being a sardine, and his little boy who didn’t like being a little boy, I don’t believe it would be a publishable work.”

(of Tristram Shandy) “To sport too much with your wit, or the game that wit has pointed out, is surfeiting; like torying with a man’s mistress, it may be very delightful solacement to the inamorata, but little to the bystander.”

(of “Lady Windermere’s Fan”) “My dear sir, I have read your manuscript. Oh, my dear sir.”

More such encouragement can be found here (and in the pages that follow).