| "The best novel written in the English language since The Great Gatsby." - Newsday |
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| "This is the horrible and hilarious account of a long failure, but a failure which turns into a success: the success that this book is. A Fan's Notes is one man's life, written with brilliance and insight. No one should have had Exley's life, and no one who has read it can ever forget it." - James Dickey |
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| "A singularly moving, entertaining, funny book." - The New York Times |
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| "Writers of every kind of aesthetic and cultural persuasion talk about it with one another, and press it on their friends to read.... When I urge A Fan's Notes on a friend who asks what is it about? or what is it like? I say read it, just read it." - Geoffrey Wolff, Los Angeles Times |
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| "A welcome reminder of what the basic business of literature and of living really is. All fans of art and life should read it." - Jack Kroll, Newsweek |
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| "Before A Fan's Notes I stand with something like the awe due a miracle." - George P. Elliott |
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| "With a kind of fantastic innocence, Exley manages to draw humor from his defeats and humiliations, and this in turn increases the anguish. And, all through, his embrace of himself is illumined with grace and an almost mandarin sense of literary timing, of when to move on to the next event, the next nightmare." - Rudolph Wurlitzer, The New Republic |
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| "An instructive, powerful and bruising experience." - William H. Gass |
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| "But all the while, part of (Exley) was groping toward an accommodation with himself and the reader knows from the opening page what his victory will be. He would, of course, finally come to write A Fan's Notes." - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times |
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| "A moving and memorable book - it has the stab of reality." - Robert Penn Warren |
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| "Exley has the Fitzgerald-like gift to wrap up the aching vision of beauty... the funnily maladroit failure to possess that beauty, and the overwhelming despair that follows the entire process - all in a single tone of narrative accuracy whose authentic sweetness is the measure of its truthtelling. His book... is a welcome reminder of what the basic business of literature, and of living, really is." - Jack Kroll, Newsweek |
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| "One of the best new novels I have read in a long time; Exley the character is worthy of comparison with Antoine Roquentin, Zeno Cosini, and Thomas Mann's Dilettante." - J. Mitchell Morse, Hudson Review |
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| "The book is a chronicle of failure and despair - on the face of it. And only on the face of it. In reality A Fan's Notes is an amazingly rich celebration of the power of language and the sheer, ebullient expressiveness to redeem even the most terrible defeats." - Kildare Dobbs |
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| "What in his book is fiction and what is not, matters not at all. What matters is the true and at times astonishing richness of his prose, the exuberant humor that prevents the book from spilling over into self-pity or bitterness, and - most of all - the clarity with which Exley, by exploring himself, explores the world to which he fiercely refuses to adjust." - Jonathan Yardley, The New Republic |
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| "Neither quite fiction nor quite autobiography (nor quite a "football novel," as it is sometimes thought of by those who have missed the point), A Fan's Notes is an eloquent and impassioned account of alcoholism and madness, love and desire, hero worship and self discovery." - Peter Dzwonkoski |
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