Praise for Terry Southern and Candy:
"A comic pornographer with a profound moral sense . . . [Southern's prose] has a weirdly old-fashioned grace, like antique gold filigree, in which his radical new ideas glow like blood-red stones. An idea man unconfined by any ideologies, Southern is a sort of hip social anarchist."New York Times
"Sex in America, after [Candy], is not going to be the same . . . Southern is an absolutely first-rate writer . . . The work of a major satirist . . . Southern is holding up a triple-angled mirror to America in which, given a rudimentary sense of humor, we are enabled to see ourselves as we really are . . . When sex is a joyous fulfillment instead of a wasting affliction, people can see that the most hilarious event in the history of mankind was the division of the sexes. This is what Southern sees; and that is what Candy says."Nelson Algren, Life
"Reading the sexploitation-drenched novel Candy . . . was one of the most physically uncomfortable experiences of my life. Uncomfortable, because no matter how I tried to shift my tush on the hard wooden chair I was sitting in, I couldn't avoid the awkward sensation of my own dripping panties. It really was that good . . . [A] satirical one-upmanship of Voltaire's Candide."Vice
"Terry Southern writes mean, cooly deliberate, and murderous prose . . . We may have at last found the rightful heir (saints protect me from sacrilege) of Nathaniel West."Norman Mailer
"Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be."William Styron
"Terry Southern was one of the first and best of the new wave of American writers, defining the cutting edge of black comedy."Joseph Heller
"Terry Southern is the illegitimate son of Mack Sennett and Edna Saint Vincent Millay."Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"Terry Southern's fiction, in short form or long, is a national treasure."Bruce Jay Friedman
"Terry Southern was the class clown of the quality-hip scene, larger, weirder, and a lot funnier than life."Jules Feiffer
"Terry Southern is a dirty Red and a marijuana head and one of the major American satirists of the twentieth century."Tony Hendra
"If there were a Mount Rushmore of American humor, Terry Southern would be the mountain they'd carve it from"Michael O'Donoghue, former writer/producer for Saturday Night Live
"Terry Southern is the American writer most capable of handling frenzy on a gigantic scale."Esquire
"Terry Southern . . . has emerged in hindsight as a kind of real-life Forrest Gump figurepresent at the creation of virtually everything new, liberating and free-spirited in post-World War II arts and culture."Denver Post