Reviewers Quotes - Page 2

• I can't write a scene unless I've visualized it. Unless I can actually see it, and that's why a lot of reviewers have said my books are very cinematic, because I actually do see them before I write them.

  Eric Van Lustbader

  Book, Writing, Scene

  "Interview With Jason Bourne Author Eric Van Lustbader". Interview with Jeff Rivera, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 18, 2012.

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• So, you see, it's a real chore for me to write a book review because it's like a contest. It's like I'm writing that book review for every bad book reviewer I've ever known and it's a way of saying [thrusts a middle finger into the air] this is how you ought to do it. I like to rub their noses in it.

  John Irving

  Real, Book, Writing

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• Reviewer: 'One of your themes was very similar to one of Beethoven's!' Brahms replied, 'Of course it is. Everyone steals - the important thing is to do it brilliantly.

  Johannes Brahms

  Important, Copying, Stealing

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• It is a fallacy to think that carping is the strongest form of criticism: the important work begins after the artist's mistakes have been pointed out, and the reviewer can't put it off indefinitely with sneers, although some neophytes might be tempted to try: "When in doubt, stick out your tongue" is a safe rule that never cost one any readers. But there's nothing strong about it, and it has nothing to do with the real business of criticism, which is to do justice to the best work of one's time, so that nothing gets lost.

  Wilfrid Sheed

  Strong, Real, Mistake

  "Essays in Disguise" by Wilfrid Sheed, Knopf, (pp. xvi-xvii), 1990.

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• With a poetry book I can send 100 copies out to reviewers and other people, and even do it in advance and get their response. It's difficult with iPad: how do you send it out for free, and how do you even disseminate it before it goes into their store?

  Felix Dennis

  Book, Ipads, People

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• The public examination of homosexuality in our contemporary life is still so coated with distasteful moral connotations that even a reviewer is bound to wonder uneasily why he was selected to evaluate a book on the subject, and to assert defensively at the outset that he is happily married, the father of four children and the one-time adornment of his college boxing, track and tennis teams.

  Sydney J. Harris

  Children, Father, Team

  "Saturday Review" Magazine, April 22, 1961.

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• Sometimes I am a collector of data, and only a collector, and am likely to be gross and miserly, piling up notes, pleased with merely numerically adding to my stores. Other times I have joys, when unexpectedly coming upon an outrageous story that may not be altogether a lie, or upon a macabre little thing that may make some reviewer of my more or less good works mad. But always there is present a feeling of unexplained relations of events that I note, and it is this far-away, haunting, or often taunting, awareness, or suspicion, that keeps me piling on.

  Charles Fort

  Lying, Data, Mad

  Charles Fort (2014). “Wild Talents”, p.35, Baen Publishing Enterprises

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• You read reviews by top reviewers of films that not only had remarkably interesting scores, but films whose effectiveness was absolutely enhanced, and frequently created by the music, yet the reviewers seem unaware that their emotions and their nervous reactions to the films have been affected by the scoring. This is a serious flaw. Any film reviewer owes it to himself, and the public, to take every element of the film into account.

  Jerry Goldsmith

  Effectiveness, Interesting, Elements

  "Music for the Movies". Book by Tony Thomas, p. 209, 1973.

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• When I began to read as an adult, I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.

  Hilary Mantel

  Fashion, Book, Novelists

  Source: www.newrepublic.com

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• There is a secret and wholesome conviction in the heart of every man or woman who has written a book that it should be no easy matter for an intelligent reader to lay down that book unfinished. There is a pardonable impression among reviewers that half an hour in its company is sufficient.

  Agnes Repplier

  Book, Heart, Men

  Agnes Repplier (1894). “In the Dozy Hours, and Other Papers”

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• I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been dismayed by a critic's bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked or thanked a reviewer for a review.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Thinking, Facts, My Favorite

  "Read Playboy … for the Interviews". Interview with Alvin Toffler, www.slate.com. January 1964.

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• An intelligent man or woman willing to make a career of reviewing fiction is hard to come by ... And the temporaries do the work cheaply. Moreover, continuity may be got at the expense of intellectual arthritis; a reviewer who has been at his grisly task for half a lifetime may stiffen into prejudices of every sort, and become too anchylosed to do better than turn his back to a new wave when it rushes down on him.

  Storm Jameson

  Intelligent, Men, Careers

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• We've learned over the years that if we wanted we could write anything that just felt good or sounded good and it didn't necessarily have to have any particular meaning to us. As odd as it seemed to us, reviewers would take it upon themselves to interject their own meanings on our lyrics. Sometimes we sit and read other people's interpretations of our lyrics and think, 'Hey, that's pretty good.' If we liked it, we would keep our mouths shut and just accept the credit as if it was what we meant all along.

  John Lennon

  Writing, Thinking, Years

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• I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Thinking, Way

  "Jamaica Kincaid Hates Happy Endings". Interview with Marilyn Berlin Snell, www.motherjones.com. September, 1997.

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• The preface is the most important part of a book. Even reviewers read a preface.

  Philip Guedalla

  Book, Important

  Philip Guedalla (1930). “The Missing Muse”

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• I did think reviewers were supposed to be polite about story collections - collections are rather delicate creatures in the literary environment - but not everybody got this memo, I guess.

  Lorrie Moore

  Thinking, Stories, Environment

  "'I would like to live in that year forever.'". Interview with Michael Hafford, logger.believermag.com. April 24, 2014.

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• The main advantage of being a reviewer is that you read a lot. A lot of books get sent to you, and you have an amazing vantage point from which to observe what's going on in contemporary fiction - not only genre stuff, the whole spectrum.

  Lev Grossman

  Book, Contemporary Fiction, Stuff

  "INTERVIEW: Lev Grossman on Writing ‘The Magician King’, Narnia and the Line Between SF and Fantasy". Interview with Andrew Liptak, www.sfsignal.com. August 17, 2011.

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• It never stops me from saying what I want to say about Ethiopia, the fact that a tour company is paid for me to go there. Book reviewers don't pay for the books they review.

  John Gimlette

  Book, Want, Pay

  Source: www.identitytheory.com

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• I naively thought I was making a low-budget movie. But, when the film came out, the Daily Variety reviewer at that time who was named Art Murphy described it as an exploitation film. I had never heard that term before. Roger never used it. So that's how I learned that I had made an exploitation film.

  Stephanie Rothman

  Art, Roger, Film

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• That's what people need to remember about reviewers; opinions can be all over the spectrum, and you just need to find a reviewer whose tastes match your own.

  Kevin J. Anderson

  People, Needs, Taste

  "Author Spotlight: Kevin J. Anderson & Sherrilyn Kenyon". Interview with Liz Argall, www.lightspeedmagazine.com. August 2016.

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• The thing about albums is just coming up with new material. I just got tired of that syndrome of putting out an album and then some reviewer claims that this song or that song has something to do with x y or z.

  Van Morrison

  Song, Tired, Albums

  Interview with Ritchie Yorke, ritchieyorke.com. April 21.

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• In the media, a reviewer has his personal vision but it's passed along to a million readers or whatever. He might think that this particular song sounds like Jo Blow. Or like a Bo Diddley record that he heard six years ago. But the artist who made the record may never have even heard the Bo Diddley song. We all respond differently.

  Van Morrison

  Song, Artist, Blow

  Interview with Ritchie Yorke, ritchieyorke.com. April 21.

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• I have to accept the fact that I was putting out records that reviewers were going to get an image from.

  Van Morrison

  Records, Facts, Accepting

  Interview with Ritchie Yorke, ritchieyorke.com. April 21.

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• When an older writer tries to tell a younger writer through a review what kind of career she should be pursuing, it tends to speak to the reviewer's anxieties rather than the book itself.

  Jennifer Weiner

  Book, Careers, Anxiety

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• If most of the reviewers are white cis men, if most of the distributors are white cis men, most of the executives in history have been white cis men. Most of the people who have been giving awards to people are people who've already been in the business - retired white cis men. They've been creating a body of narrative forever.

  Jill Soloway

  Men, White, Creating

  Source: www.chicagotribune.com

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