"Decades before it was fashionable, Gavin Lambert expertly wove characters of every sexual stripe into his lustrous tapestries of Southern California life."
 

– Armistead Maupin

"In [Lambert's] stories there is the true tenderness of pity that is not patronizing, the patience of the trained observer that is never boredom. Most of all there is enormous skill: the author has the playwright's flair for taut, meaningful dialogue; the novelist's feeling for mood; the short-story writer's love of plot; and the good movie writer's capacity for deft characterization . . . Though [his] stories are mainly confined, geographically, to Hollywood, Santa Monica, Venice (Cal.) and other near-by points, their subject is human emotion seen through a perceptive eye and evaluated by a sensitive spirit."

– Murray Schumach, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

"In the sophisticated, elegiac style of Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories . . . Lambert has respectfully, ironically, accurately looked at the place where so many movies have been made, so many lives transformed or destroyed, and endeavored to find the defining patterns beneath the facade."

– Carolyn See, WASHINGTON POST

"Lambert's characters are narcissistic, selfish and manipulative. They're forever changing their addresses and phone numbers, but can't decide who they're running from . . . The Goodby People is his dark glory, melancholic, becalmed and effortlessly resonant."

– Christopher Fowler, THE INDEPENDENT

"One of the brightest, wittiest people I have ever known. I was never bored with him."

– Mart Crowley

"He neither sentimentalizes nor cries sour grapes. How I wish I had written [his] book!"

– Christopher Isherwood

"For bitchy, witty and perceptive high-class gossip about Hollywood, there was no better source than the critic, screenwriter, novelist and biographer Gavin Lambert."

– Ronald Bergen, THE GUARDIAN