"How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct." - Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield (Speech on January 24, 1860)

"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

"The kind of thing only an accelerated culture like ours could have come up with: an instant classic." - Julian Dibbell, Amazon.com

"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft." - H. G. Wells

"That's not writing. It's typing." - Truman Capote

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

"If Thomas Edison invented electric light today, Dan Rather would report it on CBS News as ‘candle making industry threatened’." - Newt Gingrich

"It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead." - Dame Rose Macaulay (from quotations compiled by John Hewitt)

"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." - Dorothy Parker (from quotations compiled by John Hewitt)

"I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me." - Max Reger