I’m sure you know what I mean when I say that I hate that feeling when I try to think of a good insult and can’t come up with one until five minutes later when it doesn’t matter anymore. It is in times like these that it would be best to consult the experts. Here are twenty-five insults from some of the biggest names in literature, both past and present, to draw from the next time you really want to burn someone with some style.
1. “The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me.” – Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
2. “You speak an infinite deal of nothing.” – William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
3. “I couldn’t possibly have sex with someone with such a slender grasp on grammar!” – Russell Brand, My Booky Wook
4. “You’re a beast and a swine and a bloody, bloody thief!” – William Golding, Lord of the Flies
5. “He would make a good lamp post if he’d weather better and didn’t have to eat.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
6. “You are the last man in the world I could ever be prevailed upon to marry.” – Jane Austen, Pride And Prejudice
7. “If you will forgive me for being personal, I do not like your face.” – Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express
8. “May your genitals sprout wings and fly away.” – Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
9. “Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou.” – Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
10. “It should take you about four seconds to get from here to the door. I’ll give you two.” – Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
11. “The man is as useless as nipples on a breastplate.” – George R. R. Martin, A Feast For Crows
12. “All morons hate it when you call them a moron.” – J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
13. “She would of been a good woman… if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” – Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
14. “You talk to damn much and too damn much of it is about you.” – Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
15. “He would make a lovely corpse.” – Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit
16. “He is simply a hole in the air.” – George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn
17. “You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they’ll blight you—they’ll damn you.” – Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
18. “He was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone.” – Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
19. “She is nuttier than squirrel poo.” – J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
20. “If I was as ignorant as you I wouldn’t let on.” – Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
21. “Some people are easier to love when you don’t have to be around them.” – Irving Welsh, Trainspotting
22. “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.” – J. R. R. Tolkein, The Fellowship of the Ring
23. “You’ve got about as much charm as a dead slug.” – Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
24. “If looks could kill, you’d soon find out that yours couldn’t.” – Iris Owens, After Claude
25. “I misjudged you… You’re not a moron. You’re only a case of arrested development.” – Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
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