Robert Wechsler

“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you. ”
― Doris Lessing

“[A critic] can never forget that all he has to go by, finally, is his own response, the self that makes and is made up of such responses — and yet he must regard that self as no more than the instrument through which the work of art is seen, so that the work of art will seem everything to him and his own self nothing.”
― Randall Jarrell, Poetry and the Age

“Novelists who carefully deliver their coups de théâtre, artfully hold back their dividends (how much? fifteen per cent?), who wait till the end of their book to unveil the enigma, have always seemed to me like shopkeepers anxious not to lose a penny on their wares. (spoken by He)”
― Jean Dutourd