"People realize that almost all fiction or poetry is bad or mediocre--it's the nature of things. Almost all criticism is bad or mediocre too, but it's harder for people to tell . . . ." Randall Jarrell (from "The Age of Criticism," Poetry and the Age, NY: Vintage, l955. 74)

"Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good." Samuel Johnson

"Critics! Appalled I ventured on the name. Those cutthroat bandits in the paths of fame." Robert Burns

"It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends." Samuel Johnson

"The ones who want to be writers read the reviews; the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews." William Faulkner

"You don't have to eat the whole egg to tell if it's rotten." Joseph Parisi

One two-time Pulitzer Prizewinner for Fiction said he finds reviews humiliating. "All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart." John Updike

"I do not believe writers should read reviews of their own books, and I do not. If one is not careful one is soon writing to please reviewers and not their audience or themselves." Louis L'Amour

"To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent." Nelson Algren

"A person who publishes a book appears in willfully in public with his pants down." Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Nature fits all her children with something to do, He who would write and can't write, can surely review." James Russell Lowell

"One battle doesn't make a campagin, but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole war." Ernest Hemingway

"When a man publishes a book, there are so many stupid things said that he declares he'll never do it again. The praise is almost always worse than the criticism." Sherwood Anderson

". . . reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist." Anthony Burgess

"I gave up reading reviews a long time ago. It's become a medium that is more like gossip." filmmaker George Lucas

"Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. He invited publicity, and he must take the publicity that comes along." E.M. Forster

"If critics want to help me, let them come sit next to me while I'm writing." Rita Mae Brown

"Critics are like eunuchs: they know how, but they can't do it." French chef Paul Bocuse

"Time is the only critic without ambition." John Steinbeck

"Asking a writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs." Christopher Hampton

"There are two kinds of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read." H.L. Mencken

"The covers of this book are too far apart." Ambrose Bierce (upon reading a book he disliked)

"Contemporary criticism only represents the amount of ignorance genius has to contend with. . . . Time will reverse the judgement of the vulgar." Percy Byshe Shelley

"A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down . . . . If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book, nothing can help him." Edna St. Vincent Millay

"I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is presposterous. He or she is like a person who has just put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split." Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

"Confronted by an absolutely infuriating review it is sometimes helpful for the victim to do a little personal research on the critic. Is there any truth to the rumor that he had no formal education beyond the age of eleven? In any event, is he able to construct a simple English sentence? Do his participles dangle? When moved to lyricism does he write 'I had a fun time'? Was he ever arrested for burglary? I don't know that you will prove anything this way, but it is perfectly harmless and quite soothing." Jean Kerr

"I don't think that any 'ism' is higher than literature or art. So I'm a formalist. I greatly honor and respect the form of a work." Joyce Carol Oates

"If all critics agreed, only one of us would have a job." Mary Kalin-Casey, reviewer for Reel.com