"Max said little. His essential quality was always to say little, but by powerful empathy for writers and for books to draw out of them what they had it in them to say and to write."

"Max sent Scottie some literary advice, the same dictum he gave every college student who called on him. He stressed the importance of a liberal arts education but urged her to avoid all courses in writing. "Everyone has to find her own way of writing," he wrote Scottie, "and the source of finding it is largely out of literature."

"There’s a good feeling about them. It’s something I like to find in fiction. So many writers master form and technique, but get so little feeling into their work. I think that’s important."

"Another Brownell adage that Perkins subscribed to was that the worst reason for publishing anything was that it resembled something else, that however unconscious, "an imitation is always inferior."

"Publishing is not, of course, dependent on the individual taste of the publisher,” Perkins replied to one reader of Hemingway’s novel. “He is under an obligation to his profession which binds him to bring out a work which in the judgment of the literary world is significant in its literary qualities and is a pertinent criticism of the civilization of the time."