Good Commentator Quotes & Sayings

Most writers cannot afford focus groups or A/B testing, but they can ask a roommate or colleague or family member to read what they wrote and comment on it. Your reviewers needn't even be a representative sample of your intended audience. Often it's enough that they are not you. This does not mean you should implement every last suggestion they offer. Each commentator has a curse of knowledge of his own, together with hobbyhorses, blind spots, and axes to grind, and the writer cannot pander to all of them. Many academic articles contain bewildering non sequiturs and digressions that the authors stuck in at the insistence of an anonymous reviewer who had the power to reject it from the journal if they didn't comply. Good prose is never written by a committee. A writer should revise in response to a comment when it comes from more than one reader or when it makes sense to the writer herself. — Steven Pinker

Man, I don't wanna do what all the other guys do. I don't wanna end up in the booth after the games telling you what I think and talking smack about the guys on the floor when they are a lot better than that. I wanna be different. I don't wanna be known as Commentator Shaq. I wanna be a doctor or something good. I wanna be Dr. Shaq, Officer Shaq, Deputy Shaq. — Shaquille O'Neal

For the last century, almost all top political appointments [on the planet Earth] had been made by random computer selection from the pool of individuals who had the necessary qualifications. It had taken the human race several thousand years to realize that there were some jobs that should never be given to the people who volunteered for them, especially if they showed too much enthusiasm. As one shrewed political commentator had remarked: We want a President who has to be carried screaming and kicking into the White House - but will then do the best job he possibly can, so that he'll get time off for good behavior. — Arthur C. Clarke

Michelle Malkin is the most vile, hateful commentator I've ever met in my life. She actually believes that neighbors should start snitching out neighbors, and we should be deporting people. It's good she's in D.C. and I'm in New York. I'd spit on her if I saw her. — Geraldo Rivera

a leading copyright commentator concludes - with good reason - that if Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet were protected by copyright today, the Broadway musical West Side Story might well be found to infringe. — Neil Weinstock Netanel

I never gained control of my mind - how do you dominate an ocean? - but I began to form a real relationship with it. Through writing and meditation I identified monkey mind, that constant critic, commentator, editor, general slug and pain-in-the-ass, the voice that says, "I can't do this, I'm bored, I hate myself, I'm no good, I can't sit still, who do I think I am?" I saw that most of my life had been spent following that voice as though it were God, telling me the real meaning of life - "Natalie, you can't write shit" - when, in fact, it was a mechanical contraption that all human minds contain. — Natalie Goldberg