Reviewers Quotes - Page 3

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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 don’t believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well.

  James Dickey

  Believe, Praise, Criticize

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• It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.

  Edward Abbey

  Book, Reviews

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.34, RosettaBooks

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• Some of the reviewers wanted less. Some wanted lots more. Some wanted lots more of something else. But these strips are exactly what they are.

  Art Spiegelman

  Wanted

  "Art Spiegelman: The Sky Is Falling". Interview with Steven Heller, www.aiga.org. October 01, 2004.

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• Some movie I was in, I forget which one, some awful little movie, a reviewer said, What is Jessica Walter doing in this movie? And I said, Hello? Trying to make a living?

  Jessica Walter

  Trying, Littles, Awful

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• I think that curiosity happened on these reviews where I was just a guest of the reviewer, because it introduced me to new cuisines and to the idea of cooking as a mechanism for studying other cultures and understanding other parts of the world.

  Ted Allen

  Thinking, Ideas, Other Cultures

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages- all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.'

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Writing, Criticism

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• I've been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can't remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.

  Anton Chekhov

  Reading, Years, Editors

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• Book reviewers are little old ladies of both sexes.

  John O'Hara

  Sex, Book, Writing

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• The reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Editors, Horror, Critics

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.90, Macmillan

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• Under true peer-review...a panel of reviewers must accept a study before it can be published in a scientific journal. If the reviewers have objections the author must answer them or change the article to take reviewers' objections into account. Under the IPCC review process, the authors are at liberty to ignore criticisms.

  Richard Lindzen

  Liberty, Criticism, Answers

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• Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

  William S. Burroughs

  Book, Writing, Exercise

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Stupid, Race, Despair

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Illustrated)”, p.946, Delphi Classics

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• Peer reviewers go for orthodoxy ... Many of the great 19th-century discoveries were made by men who had independent wealth-Charles Darwin is the prototype. They trusted themselves.

  James Black

  Creativity, Independent, Science

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• 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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• 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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