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Critics disagree about almost every quality of a writer’s work; and when some agree about a quality, they disagree about whether it is to be praised or blamed, nurtured or rooted out. After enough criticism the writer is covered with lipstick and bruises, and the two are surprisingly evenly distributed.
--
“Poets, Critics, and Readers”, p. 99

 

Randall Jarrell

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I love kids’ fantasy...everything from L. Frank Baum to A. A. Milne … Narnia to Wonderland to Neverland. These are magical stories that nurtured me as a child and then nurtured my own children, as well. What better legacy could a writer have than to continue that wonderful tradition of imagination and insight and adventure? Comics, of course, pretty much ignore the children’s market. I’ve been obsessed, for years now, with doing some projects that could bring that level of imagination and literary and artistic quality to the comic book form

 

J. M. DeMatteis

 

The quality of what is said inevitably influences the way in which it is said, however inexperienced the writer.

 

Robertson Davies

 

One might say that every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure; a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique. A quality which one can remember without the volume at hand, can experience over and over again in the mind but can never absolutely define, as one can experience in memory a melody, or the summer perfume of a garden... It is a common fallacy that a writer, if he is talented enough, can achieve this poignant quality by improving upon his subject-matter, by using his "imagination" upon it and twisting it to suit his purpose. The truth is that by such a process (which is not imaginative at all!) he can at best produce only a brilliant sham, which, like a badly built and pretentious house, looks poor and shabby after a few years. If he achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.
The artist spends a lifetime in pursuing the things that haunt him, in having his mind "teased" by them, in trying to get these conceptions down on paper exactly as they are to him and not in conventional poses supposed to reveal their character; trying this method and that, as a painter tries different lightings and different attitudes with his subject to catch the one that presents it more suggestively than any other. And at the end of a lifetime he emerges with much that is more or less happy experimenting, and comparatively little that is the very flower of himself and his genius.

 

Willa Cather

 

A strange gratitude for those I disagree with. They keep me from having to take too seriously the moments when I disagree with myself.

 

James Richardson

 

And a writer observed, "We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity," and I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman.

 

Sarah Palin