Browsing Topic Best Reviewers Quotes

The critics and the reviewers are more frightening than anything else!

I think testing films are a great tool. And I think showing them to people that you value their opinion is important, but once you give over to what reviewers think, that’s tricky. You don’t know what their agenda is; it’s so subjective. You have got to make sure you are asking someone’s opinion who you know.

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.

I just feel I’m on a different page from the reviewers, so I’ve learned not to care about them too much.

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.

A book reviewer is usually a barker before the door of a publisher’s circus.

Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.

You know reviewers, they are the wind in their own sails.

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.

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.

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.

The thing we call critics are not really reviewers, they are not really critics. They don’t have the discipline to write what we would term as critique – it’s really just reviewers. They have a common man kind of taste. If you watch them overall, they are not different from the box-office. That’s my view.

(on A History of Western Philosophy) I was sometimes accused by reviewers of writing not a true history but a biased account of the events that I arbitrarily chose to write of. But to my mind, a man without a bias cannot write interesting history – if, indeed, such man exists.

I feel reviewers are tougher on comedies in general. They don’t take them seriously, and the ones that get great reviews are not necessarily the ones that I like.

Too often do reviewers remind us of the mob of Astrologers, Chaldeans, and Soothsayers gathered before ‘the writing on the wall’ and unable to read the characters or make known the interpretation.

Who shall dispute what the Reviewers say? Their word’s sufficient; and to ask a reason, In such a state as theirs, is downright treason.

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

At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. I hope this isn’t too melodramatic or self-centred a way of saying that I attempt to write as if I did not care what reviewers said, what peers thought, or what prevailing opinions may be.

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.

Because, as we know, almost anything can be read into any book if you are determined enough. This will be especially impressed on anyone who has written fantastic fiction. He will find reviewers, both favourable and hostile, reading into his stories all manner of allegorical meanings which he never intended. (Some of the allegories thus imposed on my own books have been so ingenious and interesting that I often wish I had thought of them myself.)

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

The reviewer is a singularly detested enemy because he is, unlike the hapless artist, invulnerable.

In fact, some reviewers have said that as they got into the story they forgot that the protagonist is a black woman. They were moved by the story – by the people as a whole – and not by the little things.

We don’t really need reviewers, just first-night reporters who will tell us faithfully whether or not the audience liked the show.

Reviewers are the worst laughers in the world.

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

The reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

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.

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.’

There is danger in the concentration of control in the television and radio networks, especially in the large television and radio stations; danger in the concentration of ownership in the press…and danger in the increasing concentration of selection by book publishers and reviewers and by the producers of radio and television programs.

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.

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.

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

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.

Religion embarrasses the commentators. It is offbounds. An editor of the old Life magazine once assigned me a book on religion with remark that I was the only ‘religious nut’ – his term for a believer – in his stable of regular reviewers.