I wouldn't call myself a 'literary critic,' just a book…

A book reviewer is usually a barker before the door of a publisher's circus.

— Austin O'Malley

“[P]ersonally, I know I’d prefer to read an honest review by someone who has no reason to lie, than a book reviewer who has…

— Catherine Ryan Howard

A literary critic is a person who finds meaning in literature that the author didn't know was there.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I don't even know what a serious literary critic is.

— John Grisham

Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.

— Mason Cooley

A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!

— Brian Lumley

“Soon after I left university, I came up with another definition of a literary critic or would be critic: someoone who uses churlish towards…

— Gerald Murnane

“A literary critic should have no emotions except those immediately provoked by a work of art.”

— T S Eliot

No publisher should ever express an opinion of the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to…

— Oscar Wilde

Any one who chooses will set up for a literary critic, though he cannot tell us where he went to school, or how much…

— Saint Basil

There's an enormous difference between being a critic and a reviewer. The reviewer reacts to the experience of that book.

— Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

I don't think of myself as a critic at all. I'm a reviewer and essayist. I mainly hope to share with others my pleasure…

— Michael Dirda

“Some book reviewer whose name I forget recently called me a 'vicious misanthrope' . . . or maybe it was a 'cynical misanthrope'. .…

— Hunter S. Thompson

“Book reviewer: Very often a writer who has never been published taking out their frustrations on a writer who has.”

— Raul Ramos y Sanchez

I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that…

— Claire Tomalin