The New York Review Of Books Quotes & Sayings

If the main pillar of the system is living a lie," wrote Havel, "then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth." Since — Timothy Snyder

I look at 'The New York Review of Books.' It's what it has been for 35 or 40 years, which is a highly sophisticated vehicle for anti-American self-hatred. — John Podhoretz

The next best thing to being clever is being able to quote some one who is. — Mary Pettibone Poole

My dream when I was 14 was someday I could have a David Levine caricature of me in 'The New York Review of Books.' — Chris Hayes

Men's minds do not die with their bodies but are made more happy or miserable after this life according to their actions. — Benjamin Franklin

Stage One is simply being able to sit down and work, if only for a single hour. Don't laugh. Ninety-nine out of a hundred can't do it. This stage is entry-level. It's kindergarten. — Jocelyn K. Glei

As a journalist, I never critiqued anyone. I never review books. I've never felt qualified as a musician to say whether someone is a good musician or a bad musician. What happens with Black writers and Black artists is that if you're critiqued, for example, by a Black historian who wants to get his name on the cover of "The New York Times," and he says something, like, wacky, well, he'll get his name on the cover of "The New York Times" and he might get tenure, and your career suffers. — James McBride

I've been at the very bottom of poverty, and it's not so bad. It's even kind of interesting. You can live there with a certain amount of style. — Carolyn See

The first requirement of a sound body of law is, that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

My particular historical vantage point is a product of my upbringing as that odd duck, a native Washingtonian whose parents were not in government. The first presidential transition of my sentient lifetime, Kennedy's, I remember vividly. — Frank Rich

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books. — Anna Quindlen

The world is telling you through The New York Times and The New York Review of Books "You must shut up. You must never appear again. Because you are not relevant to us." So you have to fight their attempt to destroy you, fight to continue feeling. — James Purdy

My husband and I are huge bibliophiles. He's always reading 'The New York Times Book Review' and then ordering 20 books online. — Carrie Coon

Romance is the sweetening of the soul
With fragrance offered by the stricken heart. — Wole Soyinka

Eighty percent of the reviewers and authors of reviewed books in the New York Review of Books in 2013 were men, as were almost 80 percent of the 'notable deaths' reported in the New York Times in 2012. — Laura Bates

Nowadays, even The New York Times Book Review is afraid to say when a popular book is crap. — Lorin Stein

The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove. — Freeman Dyson

In 1986, I read a remarkable article by Israel Rosenfield in The New York Review of Books in which he discussed the revolutionary work and views of Gerald M. Edelman. Edelman was nothing if not bold. We are at the beginning of — Oliver Sacks

The French are pretty thin-skinned. The few times I mentioned a French writer in 'City Boy,' the relatives would ring up in high dudgeon. I once wrote a mocking review of Marguerite Duras in the 'New York Review of Books,' and good friends of mine in France got very angry. — Edmund White

The hardest thing about life is that every now and then you have to do things so you have something to tweet about. — Andy Borowitz

Ads answered out of desperation in the New York Review of Books proved equally futile as ... the 'Bay Area Bisexual' told me I didn't quite coincide with either of her desires. — Woody Allen

Mindy Sue, you are a pretty, lively, successful female, fluent in French and German. You are a professional woman but also sportif. You care buckets, I can see that. How did you get yourself in this terrible predicament? How did you become a four-line seventy-five-cents-a-word advertisement in the back pages of The New York Review of Books? — Donald Barthelme

It infuriates me that stuff from the Internet routinely doesn't include all the credits. Because as soon as I listen to something, if I like it, I want to know, "Who's the bass player?" "Who did that?" "Who's the engineer on this?" — Brian Eno

I'm crazy about Steven Spielberg. Another inspiration for me, and I don't know where it came from, is children. If I'm down, I'll take a book with children's pictures and look at it and it will just lift me up. Being around children is magic. — Michael Jackson

The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial. — Joyce Carol Oates

The spirit of the Internet. This spirit is a powerful myth concocted by overzealous legal activists, and the sooner we bury it, the better. — Evgeny Morozov

Nearly every writer writes a book with a great amount of attention and intention and hopes and dreams. And it's important to take that effort seriously and to recognize that a book may have taken ten years of a writer's life, that the writer has put heart and soul into it. And it behooves us, as book-review-editors, to treat those books with the care and attention they deserve, and to give the writer that respect."
Pamela Paul, New York Times Book Review editor, in a Poets & Writer's interview
(something for all reviewers to think about) — Madeline Sharples

Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books. — John Updike

Kiera, I don't want to tell you how to handle your relationship with him, but ... you'll never last if you start lying to him -Denny — S.C. Stephens

He wasn't speaking to me anymore. We were living in our own worlds of little memories, and even though we were both separate, somehow we managed to feel for one another. Lonely often recognized lonely. And today, for the first time, I began to see the man behind the beard. I — Brittainy C. Cherry

The New York Times Review of Books is toilet paper. Used. — James Purdy

Sunsets require sunshine ["Surveillance: Out of the Shadows," New York Review of Books, June 2, 2015]. — David Cole