Reviewers Quotes - Page 3

• I come from a nation where fantastic fiction has a very low status, unless it fits into some very specific categories or is written by already established authors. I don't by any means try to hide what I write, but the way people think in categories here is pretty extreme: it blots out discussing the actual work on its own terms. That's made me loath to talk about my own work in terms of genre, because once you get a label, it sticks and poof go a slew of potential readers and reviewers because eww, fantasy cooties.

  Karin Tidbeck

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• As for whether genre considerations influence what I write, they don't at all, but I might sell more books if they did. The Night Journal is a hodge-podge of historical fiction, western, mystery, and contemporary domestic drama. It doesn't settle into a specific market, reviewers have a hard time describing it, and sometimes it gets classified weirdly in bookstores. But from a writer's standpoint, I like that it's hard to categorize.

  Elizabeth Crook

  Drama, Book, Writing

  Source: www.elizabethcrookbooks.com

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• I write with the idea that nobody will care about what I've written; I publish with the idea that nobody will care either. Which is why every time somebody cares enough to read a novel of mine, or respond to it - a reader, a reviewer, even my own editor - I'm a little bit amazed, and so hugely grateful.

  Lauren Grodstein

  Grateful, Writing, Editors

  Source: www.salon.com

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• When reviewers take the trouble to compliment a writer on her style, it is usually because she has made it easy for them to slide from one sentence to another like an otter down a slope.

  William H. Gass

  Otters, Style, Slides

  Source: theuntranslated.wordpress.com

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• 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

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• I sometimes get tired because I can seldom read a book for pleasure. I'm like the play reviewer who happens to go to a play on an off day and can't help but view it critically.

  Robert Cormier

  Book, Tired, Views

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• Some reviewer might be out there saying, obviously Edge of Darkness didn't come off because of the script, blah blah blah, but everybody has read the script, except the journalist attacking it.

  William Monahan

  Darkness, Might, Scripts

  Source: collider.com

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• What can you think when one review says "this album is brilliant, and all the songs flow into the utmost brilliant song 'The Upside-Down Cross'" then another review says "this album is brilliant, except for that horrible and pointless song 'The Upside-Down Cross'," and another review will say "Jeffrey really sounds confident and relaxed on this new album", the next reviewer says "Jeffrey sounds more depressed and awful than ever" - these totally contrasting reviews happen all the time!

  Jeffrey Lewis

  Song, Thinking, Awful

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Some reviewers have read this as cynicism but I don't see it that way. When I say "I am so sick / of pretending to be me," it's exhaustion at the everyday performance, in life, in art, even in our most intimate encounters.

  Randall Mann

  Art, Sick, Everyday

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I want to look at myself the way I do on purpose, because if you aggrandize and try to look at yourself the way a fan does or the way a reviewer does or the way - God bless them, they all got a right to, everybody's got a right to an opinion about it.

  David Crosby

  Trying, Fans, Doe

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I don't read the reviews because they're too horrible and the reviewers have not been big supporters of mine over the years, probably because I make these big populist movies and they hate it.

  Rob Cohen

  Hate, Years, Reviews

  Source: screenrant.com

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• I am tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.... when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Christian, Sarcastic, Reading

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• Is it not clear that a reviewer's psyche, like an iceberg, is seven-eighths beneath the surface?

  Delmore Schwartz

  Seven, Beneath The Surface, Iceberg

  Delmore Schwartz (1985). “Letters of Delmore Schwartz”, Persea Books

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• I am never much interested in the effects of what I write....I seldom read with any attention the reviews of my...books. Two times out of three I know something about the reviewer, and in very few cases have I any respect for his judgments. Thus his praise, if he praises me, leaves me unmoved. I can't recall any review that has even influenced me in the slightest. I live in sort of a vacuum, and I suspect that most other writers do, too. It is hard to imagine one of the great ones paying any serious attention to contemporary opinion.

  H. L. Mencken

  Book, Writing, Two

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• I am not alone in bearing grudges against reviewers who have doomed a book's chances because they've missed the point, the tone, everything.

  Ann Beattie

  Book, Tone, Chance

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• I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros-but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds.

  John Irving

  Rhinos, Bird, Be Kind

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• Critics are giving marks for originality, acting, photography and scripting, while mass audiences are more drawn to familiarity of genre, stars they would like to have sex with or plots that are more likely to make their dates have sex with them. Reviewers are doing their day's work, cinema-goers are escaping from theirs: this leads to an inevitable difference of response. It is, though, wrong to conclude that reviewers are completely useless. Books, movies and shows may be critic-proof, but the egos and psyches of the people who make them very rarely are.

  Mark Lawson

  Photography, Sex, Stars

  "Who cares what the reviews say?" by Mark Lawson, www.theguardian.com. May 24, 2006.

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• There's an enormous difference between being a critic and a reviewer. The reviewer reacts to the experience of that book.

  Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

  Book, Differences, Enormous

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• Almost any show that has reviewers behind it, Rotten Tomatoes behind it, will find a way to survive.

  Henry Blodget

  Tomatoes, Rotten, Way

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

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• I am a bad reporter because everything seems to me worth reporting; and a bad reviewer because every sentence in every book suggests a separate essay.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Book, Essays, Sentences

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• I believe passionately in preemptive pessimism, especially before a book comes out. I expect the worst both from reviewers and sales, and then, with any luck, I may be proved wrong.

  Antony Beevor

  Believe, Book, Luck

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• Richard Price got a million dollar advance on one fake film book based on a paragraph outline and is able to seduce gullible White reviewers who know less about ghetto life than he. The New York Times has devoted more space to Price's tourist, ghetto writing than to any Black writer in history.

  Ishmael Reed

  New York, Book, Writing

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• Lazy reviewers look up other people's reviews and they write the same thing, so you get people writing crap based on crap.

  Joni Mitchell

  Writing, People, Lazy

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• Memoirs have at their heart a content that "happened" to someone in real life. Is that what you are itching at in your question, so that if you are a reviewer or you are writing a critique you might feel as if you are stepping on someone's actual face?

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Real, Writing, Heart

  Source: therumpus.net

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• When you are out of favor, so to speak, it's not just the reviewers. It's the editors, the publishers, they don't want you anymore, you're just gone and you've been written out of history as effectively as the old Stalinists would write someone else out, take their photograph out of a book.

  Frederic Tuten

  Book, Writing, Editors

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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