You have to keep your eye on the job because words are very sly, the rubbishy ones go into hiding and you have to dig them out—repetition, synonyms, things that simply don’t mean anything.
[Isaak Babel]

Flannery O’Connor, in a letter, on a review of “A Good Man is Hard to Find”:

“The notice in the New Yorker was not only moronic, it was unsigned. It was a case in which it is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.”