“Though I was always waked for eclipses, and indeed carried to the window as an infant in arms and shown Halley’s Comet in my sleep, and though I’d been taught at our diningroom table about the solar system and knew the earth revolved around the sun, and our moon around us, I never found out the moon didn’t come up in the west until I was a writer and Herschel Brickell, the literary critic, told me after I misplaced it in a story. He said valuable words to me about my new profession: ‘Always be sure you get your moon in the right part of the sky.'”

Eudora Welty

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“When I read a review, a mere short review, I am more interested at first in who is doing the reviewing than in the work under discussion. The name, what is attached to it by previous work, by serious thought, tells me whether it is likely to have any meaning or value for me. It is not a question of right or wrong specific opinions, but of the quality of the mind.”

Elizabeth Hardwick

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“He had never been a good critic, because among other things, he could not pan a friend. (I know this seems a barbarous test, but without it, everything comes unstuck; and nonfriends suffer disproportionately.)”

Wilfrid Sheed

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“I’ve always tried out my material on my dogs first. You know, with Angel, he sits there and listens and I get the feeling he understands everything. But with Charley, I always felt he was just waiting to get a word in edgewise. Years ago, when my red setter chewed up the manuscript of Of Mice and Men, I said at the time that the dog must have been an excellent literary critic.”

John Steinbeck

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“Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic, never. Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don’t put them on paper.”

Truman Capote

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