Reviewer Quotes & Sayings

Any debut novel is usually a case of spitting into the wind - or, just maybe, casting your bread upon the waters. Without an established audience in place, first-time authors have to hope for resonant word of mouth and a receptive reviewer or three. — Paul Di Filippo

I do often read others' reviews to see if I agree or disagree. Most commonly what happens is that a reviewer will point out something bad about a book I enjoyed that I didn't notice, and it'll make me think "Huh, I guess that WAS dumb." So in general, reading reviews makes me dislike things more. HOORAY FOR WEB 2.0 — David Malki

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

I did a play once where a reviewer said, 'Martin Freeman's too nice to play a bad guy.' And I thought: 'Well, bad guys aren't always bad guys, you know?' When I see someone play the obvious villain, I know it's false. — Martin Freeman

Whenever a text-book is written of real educational worth, you may be quite certain that some reviewer will say that it will be difficult to teach from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. It it were easy, the book ought to be burned. — Alfred North Whitehead

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

I am a book reviewer. I write for a glossy magazine called 'SCI FI.' The money is not life-changing, but it's a low-stress gig. Publishers send me their books. More than I could possibly read. I pick a few and write about them, put a very few others on the shelf, to be perused at my leisure, someday. — Adam-Troy Castro

Every true artist should look upon a review without judgment, anger or disdain, with the realization that the reviewer has exposed far more of their true selves in their words, than you have, in your art. — Robert Black

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae. — Kurt Vonnegut

My constant fear as a writer as that I will fail to convey the gravity of living. I know that to some degree that sets me up as boorish, but I'll have to live with that, and, honestly, I'd rather err on the side of being "unredeemingly dark," as one reviewer said about blood kin, than on keeping to the sunny side. — Mark Powell

For Thanksgiving, a quote from my book, The Restaurant Reviewer, with deepest thanks for all the bounty:

In the kitchen here ingredients are cherished. This restaurant remembers that food tastes good. — Nao Hauser

I have earned wages as a waitress, a nanny, a librarian, a personnel officer, an agricultural laborer, an advertising secretary, a typesetter, a proofreader, a mental-health-care provider, a substitute teacher, and a book reviewer. In and around the edges of all those jobs I have written poems, stories, and books, books, books. — Karen Hesse

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

My mother had not acted for ten years. Not since a reviewer wrote that her portrayal of Lady Macbeth put him in mind of an exasperated society hostess burdened with unmannerly guests who had lost the new tennis balls, left the bathrooms in a mess, and finished the gin. — Victoria Clayton

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

I was a latecomer to romance, although I did read gothics. My father used to work for the 'Fort Worth Star-Telegram,' and their book reviewer, author Leonard Sanders, would pass on the gothics for my dad to give to me since Leonard didn't review gothics. I gobbled up books by Mary Stewart, Madeleine Brent, Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney. — Lori Wilde

Being a lifetime wife and mother has afforded me the luxury of having multiple and even simultaneous careers: I've been a chauffeur. A chef. An interior decorator. A landscape architect, as well as a gardener. I've been a painter. A furniture restorer. A personal shopper. A veterinarian's assistant and sometimes the veterinarian. I've been an accountant, a banker and on occasion, a broker. I've been a beautician. A map. A psychic. Santa Claus. The Tooth Fairy. The T.V. Guide. A movie reviewer. An angel. God. A nurse and a nursemaid. A psychiatrist and psychologist. Evangelist. For a long time I have felt like I inadvertently got my master's in How To Take Care of Everybody Except Yourself and then a Ph.D. in How to Pretend Like You Don't Mind. But I do mind. — Terry McMillan

Come now, what's a reviewer?" I reasoned. "One who reads quickly, arrogantly, but never wisely ... — David Mitchell

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

Note that the #1 Top Reviewer at Amazon (4550 book reviews) is Harriet Klausner, formerly an acquisitions librarian in Pennsylvania. This just goes to show that librarians were destined to rule the Web. — Peter Morville

Most books reviews aren't very well-written. They tend to be more about the reviewer than the book. — Tibor Fischer

[P]ersonally, I know I'd prefer to read an honest review by someone who has no reason to lie, than a book reviewer who has an employer and a publishing house to keep happy. — Catherine Ryan Howard

The worst disgrace that can befall a producer is an unkind notice from a New York reviewer. When this happens, the producer becomes a pariah in Hollywood. He is shunned by his friends, thrown into bankruptcy, and like a Japanese electing hara-kiri, he commits suttee. — S.J Perelman

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was. — Jackson Pollock

I love to read, but I'm not a reviewer. I'll leave the reviewing to someone else. Suffice it to say, if I'm reading your book, I'm loving it. — John Inman

Holmes laid out a continental drift theory that was in its fundamentals the theory that prevails today. It was still a radical proposition for the time and widely criticized, particularly in the United States, where resistance to drift lasted longer than elsewhere. One reviewer there fretted, without any evident sense of irony, that Holmes presented his arguments so clearly and compellingly that students might actually come to believe them. Elsewhere, — Bill Bryson

The main challenges for a reviewer in peer reviewing:
- Knowing the field to which a certain manuscript belongs very well.
- Having experience in reviewing manuscripts.
- Having abilities to make reviewer's remarks clear.
- Having enough time to evaluate the manuscript in depth.
- Obeying the editorial deadline for doing a review.
- Having a strong interest in scholarly journals.
- Being fluent in English. — Eraldo Banovac

A book reviewer is usually a barker before the door of a publisher's circus. — Austin O'Malley

The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book. — Toni Morrison

The power of the print reviewer is one of those urban myths. There have always been shows that slipped under the critical radar to become popular successes: 'Tobacco Road', 'Abie's Irish Rose' and our old friend 'Spider-Man', which got the worst reviews in theatre history and is still apparently going strong. — Ben Brantley

[Reviewing the New York City Telephone Directory] But it is the opinion of the present reviewer that the weakness of plot is due to the great number of characters which clutter up the pages. The Russian school is responsible for this. — Robert Benchley

Let's face it: Sadness and evil are always more believable than happiness and love. When a movie reviewer calls a film "realistic," everyone knows what that means
it means the movie has an unhappy ending. — Chuck Klosterman

There was one reviewer from the 'New York Times,' I forget his name, who said I was 'death warmed over.' I wrote him back that I knew more about death than he did. The 'Times' fired him, put him in the cooking department! — James Rosenquist

I was on the junior team when I was a freshman, that's how good I was. But I wasn't on my eighth-grade team, because some coach - some Grammy, some reviewer, some fashion person, some blah blah blah - they're all the same as that coach. — Kanye West

A writer should not review a book. A reviewer should not write. — Bhaskar Sharma

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

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

The plot is so tired that even this reviewer, who in infancy was let drop by a nurse with the result that she has ever since been mystified by amateur coin tricks, was able to guess the identity of the murderer from the middle of the book. — Dorothy Parker

Life is made up of strange coincidences," said Thorndyke. "Nobody but a reviewer of novels is ever really surprised at a coincidence. — R. Austin Freeman

the Pednosophers who, by one name or another, actually did exist in late 16th century London. It numbered among its members Marlowe and Raleigh. ('Its president is in the Azores,' says Cotton, of Raleigh. And so he was.) Probably only one reader in a million will detect this obscure reference. I pray it's the reviewer for The New York Times. — John Yeoman

I read the GAO report, and it reminds me of a review I read of Lady Chatterley's Lover in the magazine Field and Stream. The reviewer of that book knew as much about the real purpose of Lady Chatterley's Lover as the GAO knows about the design and development of submarines. — Sherry Sontag

Evelyn's New Age daughter will discover that a good shag beats hugging a guru any day.
- Helen Falconer, book reviewer for The Guardian — Deborah Moggach

I couldn't give a sh*t what they have to say. As soon as I go home and see my husband [James Thornton of Holby Blue fame] and pick up my dog and cuddle him, that's all that matters. I couldn't care if some theatre reviewer thinks my American accent sounds a bit Welsh. — Joanna Page

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

Some book reviewer whose name I forget recently called me a 'vicious misanthrope' ... or maybe it was a 'cynical misanthrope' ... but either way, he (or she) was right; and what got me this way was politics. — Hunter S. Thompson

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

Over the years, more than one reviewer has described my fantasy series, 'A Song of Ice and Fire', as historical fiction about history that never happened, flavoured with a dash of sorcery and spiced with dragons. I take that as a compliment. — George R R Martin

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

[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account. — Dorothy L. Sayers

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

What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy. — Tom Robbins

I don't believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well. — James Dickey

He was the son of this bitchy book reviewer. Totally blasted my first book. Called all my lovely kinksters 'sick' and 'abusive.' So I got my payback by sickly abusing her youngest all night long."
"And you felt guilty about that?"
"Not the sex. The note I sent Mom the next day."
"You sent his mother a note after you seduced her son? What did it say?"
"It said..." Nora began, and paused for a breath. Not one of her prouder moments. "It said, 'Your son gave me five stars last night. And five fingers.'"
"You're smiling."
"I'm trying so hard to feel bad about it. I swear to God I am. — Tiffany Reisz

Literary Teas are constantly in a state of flux. The uninitiated gravitates toward the author, the author toward the editor or publisher, the publisher toward the reviewer, and the reviewer, in desperation, toward another drink. — Mark Kurlansky

I wouldn't call myself a 'literary critic,' just a book reviewer. — Neel Mukherjee

For obvious reasons, the relationship between novelists, the reviewing establishment and critics in general is chronically, and often acutely, edgy. A kind of low-intensity warfare prevails, with outbreaks of savagery. It is partly an ownership issue. Who, other than its creator, is to say what a work of fiction means or is worth? It can take years to write a novel and only a few hours for a critic, or a reviewer rushing for a tight deadline, to trash it. — John Sutherland

As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

The truth is, my folk-lore friends and my Saturday Reviewer differ with me on the important problem of the origin of folk-tales. They think that a tale probably originated where it was found. — Joseph Jacobs

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

The reviewer's view knew not of the true part of the writer's view, so good or bad, do not brew, and let them through to another part of you. — Mark Donnelly

Book reviewer: Very often a writer who has never been published taking out their frustrations on a writer who has. — Raul Ramos Y Sanchez

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

A good critic is trying to tell you what she has learned about herself from the reading of a particular piece of literature. A bad reviewer is often trying to tell you how smart he is by declaring whether or not he liked a particular book. If he liked the book, then this is the kind of book a superior person likes, and vice versa. He might try to explain why he didn't like it, but the review is really just a tautology. "I didn't like this book because it is bad," is equivalent to "This book is bad because I didn't like it. — Kevin Guilfoile

Then I realized that I was falling victim to one of the fallacies of the bad reviewer (whose habits we already discussed at length in yesterday's commentary). I was wishing that Hamid had written a different book than he had. How I might have written this story is completely irrelevant. It would be like dismissing The Godfather because I wished it were a musical. The novel needs to be considered on its own terms. — Kevin Guilfoile

The reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror. — Flannery O'Connor

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

The same tantalizing guile and sublime skill ... [The series is] reinforced in its claim to be one of the major literary works of this century ... Only two other writers that this reviewer can think of have each created an entire, discrete and compelling world, a totally believable entity which one might wish to inhabit, and they are Joyce and Proust. It is not pretentious to place Patrick O'Brian in the first canon of literature ... — Kevin Myers

Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer. — Richard Holt Hutton

Over the years, during television interviews, whenever the host or the reviewer or whoever gets cynical and nasty with me, I will behave accordingly. I will defend myself. — John Lydon

Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label
to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must never not write a certain kind of novel out of fear of what the reaction to it will be. — John Irving

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

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

I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them. — John Banville

A reviewer once commented that my urban fantasy novels were paced more like epic fantasy, in that they relied on complex world-building and a gradual immersion in the lives of the characters. — Laura Anne Gilman

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

If a reviewer is beating me up, I just say, 'Oh well, my writing is not to his or her taste.' And that's as far as it goes. Because I will simultaneously read a review where somebody says, 'Oh my God, I had so much fun reading this book and I learned so much.' — Dan Brown

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

I've always liked an easygoing, colloquial style. I like the kind of reviewer who is essentially a fellow reader, an enthusiast, a fan. — Michael Dirda

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard. — John Steinbeck

By my latest count, there have been 340 peer-reviewed articles published on TM,1 many of which have appeared in highly respected journals. For those unfamiliar with scientific publishing, "peer-reviewed" means that each article is subjected to scrutiny by independent reviewers who are authorities in their field. Even if the reviewers deem the article worthy, they typically suggest changes; only after these recommendations have been addressed does the paper get published. As a researcher who has been both reviewer and reviewee, I can vouch for the large amount of work that goes into this process. — Norman E. Rosenthal

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

I urge you strongly not to give Stop the Goodreads Bullies traffic. Their initial postings were all doxings of reviewers ... There are a lot of arguments on the legitimacy of doxing, but I think most reasonable people would agree that the response to a negative - not even libelous - review should not be the open posting of a reviewer's address. That's not the counter of speech by more speech, but with an implicit threat. It's not that you're wrong, and here's why; it's that I know where you live. — G.R. Reader

How much of a book review is about the reviewer? Sometimes it's mostly about the reviewer! — Kathryn Harrison

There was a period when I lived on book reviews, when I had basked and drawn sustenance from what I deemed the light of their intelligence, the beneficience of their charm. But something had gone sour. Over the years I had read too much, in dim-lighted railway stations, lying on the davenports of strangers' houses, in the bleak and dismal wards of insane asylums. That reading had forced the charm to relinquish itself. Now I found that reviews were not only bland but scarcely, if ever, relevant; and that all books, whether works of imagination or the blatant frauds of literary whores, were approached by the reviewer with the same crushing sobriety. I wanted to reviewer to be fair, kind, and funny. I wanted to be made to laugh. — Frederick Exley

I don't think of myself as a critic at all. I'm a reviewer and essayist. I mainly hope to share with others my pleasure in the books and authors I write about, though sometimes I do need to cavil and point out shortcomings. — Michael Dirda

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

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

I will say overwhelmingly what means so much more to me than the opinion of one reviewer are the letters I get from fans who tell me how a particular book has changed their life. — Jodi Picoult

Many reviews are useless because, while purporting to condemn the book, they only reveal the reviewer's dislike of the kind to which it belongs. Let bad tragedies be censured by those who love tragedy, and bad detective stories by those who love the detective story. Then we shall learn their real faults. Otherwise we shall find epics blamed for not being novels, farces for not being high comedies, novels by James for lacking the swift action of Smollett. Who wants to hear a particular claret abused by a fanatical teetotaller, or a particular woman by a confirmed misogynist? — C.S. Lewis

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

While much recent historicist criticism has assumed early nineteenth-century readers attuned to subtle ideological nuances in poetry, actual responses from readers often come closer to clulessness ... It is no surprise that no one understood Blake, but other poets fared not much better ... Coleridge's 'Christabel' was 'the standing enigma which puzzles the curiosity of literary circles. What is it all about?', while another reviewer asked about Shelley, 'What, in the name of wonder on one side, and of common sense on the other, is the meaning of this metaphysical rhapsody about the unbinding of Prometheus?'. Even Keats was condemned for 'his frequent obscurity and confusion of language' and his 'unintelligible quaintness'. Byron, never to be outdone, boasted in 'Don Juan' that not only did he not understand many of his fellow poets, he did not understand himself either: 'I don't pretend that I quite understand / My own meaning when I would be very fine.' ... — Andrew Elfenbein

Writers are funny about reviews: when they get a good one they ignore it
but when they get a bad review they never forget it. Every writer I know is the same way: you get a hundred good reviews, and one bad, andyou remember only the bad. For years, you go on and fantasize about the reviewer who didn't like your book; you imagine him as a jerk, a wife-beater, a real ogre. And, in the meantime, the reviewer has forgotten all about the whole thing. But, twenty years later, the writer still remembers that one bad review. — Art Buchwald

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

I've read a lot of bad books. I used to review books for a living, and when you're a reviewer you read tons of terrible books. — John Green

A reviewer's lot is not always an easy one. I can remember flogging myself to finish Harold Brodkey's 'The Runaway Soul' despite the novel's consummate, unmitigated tedium. — Michael Dirda

What Hitchens should have written is: I wouldn't know the difference between conceptualism and realism, essentially and accidentally ordered causal series, Aristotle and Hume, etc., even if I were intellectually honest; but then, neither will the book reviewer at the New York Times, so who cares? — Edward Feser

The reviewer is a singularly detested enemy because he is, unlike the hapless artist, invulnerable. — Carroll O'Connor

Before she married my father, my mother was a film reviewer for The Akron Beacon Journal - a small newspaper. — Jim Jarmusch

What I expect of a movie reviewer is that he should love cinema as much as I do. — Patrice Leconte