“He is a visionary posing as a farceur.”
Salman Rushdie

“[Wagner’s The Empty Chair] would make a fine fictional companion to the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s writings on spiritual outrage and the impossibility of solace.”
 Dani Shapiro

“To say that [Maps To The Stars] deglamorizes the movie business is like saying that Upton Sinclair deglamorized the meat-packing industry… the medium of film allows Wagner to make his audience visualize (instead of merely imagine) the hallucinations that plague his characters.”
Francine Prose

“Bruce Wagner writes really wonderfully about that whole milieu [of Hollywood] and its gothic vanity.”
Emma Cline

“Wagner is a James Joyce whose Dublin is Hollywood.”
David Cronenberg

“Bruce Wagner’s stories about Hollywood are the best I’ve read since F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West.”
Terry Southern

“Wagner writes like a wizard. His prose writhes and coruscates.”
John Updike