Book Critic Quotes

#1. Your function as a critic is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn't you are glad that someone else had, although obviously it might have been done better. - Author: Stephen Potter

#2. Belief is like plastic flowers, which look like flowers from far away. Trust is real rose. It has roots, and roots go deep into your heart and into your being. - Author: Rajneesh

#3. Asking a critic to name his favorite book is like asking a butcher to name his favorite pig. - Author: John McCarthy

#4. Up the two terrace flights of steps the rain ran wildly, and beat at the great door, like a swift messenger rousing those within;. - Author: Charles Dickens

#5. As we passed his table, I saw that the device that imprisoned the book was clever but wicked-looking, as though the critic were holding the work - and it's author - in bondage. - Author: Dean Koontz

#6. A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote. - Author: Mignon McLaughlin

#7. A true critic, in the perusal of a book, is like a dog at a feast, whose thoughts and stomach are wholly set upon what the guests fling away, and consequently is apt to snarl most when there are the fewest bones. - Author: Jonathan Swift

#8. More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could help it, than have a baby alone. - Author: Randall Jarrell

#9. You can't ever approach a book as a complete virgin, certainly not if you're a critic. There is a lot of bad faith out there. That's why I finally trained myself not to look at this stuff anymore, because it doesn't do me any good to see myself either praised or attacked. - Author: Paul Auster

#10. Survival is a growth strategy. - Author: Ian Hogarth

#11. A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender. - Author: Jim Bishop

#12. But the only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you; it may have other and much more profound meanings for the critic, but at second-hand they can be of small service to you. - Author: W. Somerset Maugham

#13. When someone writes a book review, they obviously already self-identify as a writer. I mean, they are. They're writers, they're critics, and they're writing about a book about a writer who's a critic. So I think it's really hard for people to distance themselves from what they're criticizing. - Author: Chuck Klosterman

#14. Not to be a socialist at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head. - Author: Georges Clemenceau

#15. Wait a second, is a snooty book critic actually admitting to judging books by their covers? - Author: Larry Correia

#16. It is a man's world at the top, at the bottom, and in between. Men are in the catbird seat as far as income, opportunity, status, and power are concerned. This is the way it always has been and, as far as men are concerned, it is the way it always should be. - Author: Joyce Brothers

#17. I wouldn't call myself a 'literary critic,' just a book reviewer. - Author: Neel Mukherjee

#18. I was never confident about finishing a book, but friends encouraged me. When I finished my first book, it was accepted by a publisher right away and became an instant bestseller. One male critic called it the most shocking book he ever read. - Author: Jackie Collins

#19. If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it's yours. - Author: Julian Barnes

#20. A forward critic often dupes us With sham quotations peri hupsos, And if we have not read Longinus, Will magisterially outshine us. Then, lest with Greek he over-run ye, Procure the book for love or money, Translated from Boileau's translation, And quote quotation on quotation. - Author: Jonathan Swift

#21. I feel good in my own skin because I've accepted the fact that I'm me. That's what's so great about being alive and being on this planet: Everybody's different. - Author: Kelly Osbourne

#22. In the meanest hut is a romance, if you knew the hearts there. - Author: Karl August Varnhagen Von Ense

#23. I think anyone who's not as good a writer as me is absolutely a hack, and I think anybody who's a slightly better writer than me is brilliant. So of course that makes me a horrible critic when it comes to books, because I can't distance my own experience from what I'm doing. - Author: Chuck Klosterman

#24. One 'Magic Formula' is for you to become your own best friend and your own biggest critic SIMULTANEOUSLY. - Author: Shay Dawkins

#25. I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention. - Author: Jennifer Weiner

#26. If I were related to Monet, I don't know if I would be comfortable becoming an artist because it's too much, the comparison. If I wrote a book and put it out, the comparison to my great-grandfather, the comparison would be hilarious. Every critic, it would be their dream, they'd tear me apart. - Author: Dree Hemingway

#27. Trying to save ecosystems has more to do with changing egosystems. - Author: Don Rittner

#28. Criticism can be instructive in the sense that it gives readers, including the author of the book, some information about the critic's intelligence, or honesty, or both. - Author: Anonymous

#29. How had I not noticed her there before? She stuck out like a whore in church. Except in this case it was the direct opposite. She stuck out like an angel in hell. - Author: Tabatha Vargo

#30. Good men do the most harm. - Author: Henry Adams

#31. The mass-market paperback, for one, is too expensive. - Author: Walter Jon Williams

#32. This editor is a critic. He has pulled out his carving-knife and his tomahawk and is starting after a book which he is going to have for breakfast. - Author: Mark Twain

#33. If Bill O'Reilly is calling you a far-left critic, in my book, no matter what your political persuasion is, that's probably - that probably means you're doing a good job. - Author: Michael Hastings

#34. A certain type of critic doesn't really want French movies to be visual. They think movies started from books and they forgot this part of moviemaking, like Chaplin and Buster Keaton, which I didn't forget. - Author: Audrey Tautou