Top 100 Quotes About Bad Reviews
#1. I don't pay much attention to the press. My films always get good reviews and bad reviews. I just try to make the best film I can.
Paul Haggis
#2. Every year I tell myself that I'm not going to read any reviews and then I do. We're all human and when I read something negative it hurts. I think when you write it's part of the game, you're going to get some good reviews and some bad reviews and that's how it goes. I don't write for the reviews.
Jodi Picoult
#3. Combined families often get bad reviews, but the family my children got when they traded away 'the suffocating four-person' nuclear one is one that has benefited all of them.
Jane Smiley
#4. So far I haven't really been prominent enough to get critical attention focused on me. So, of course, I fully expect bad reviews, but I will be wracked with misery as a result.
Emily Mortimer
#5. If there's a good review, I'll skip over the headline, but I always find the bad reviews and read those. I don't know why. It's a little sick and demented.
Damien Chazelle
#6. I never read bad reviews about myself, because my friends invariably tell me about them.
Oscar Levant
#7. I get a sick joy out of bad reviews. I don't read good reviews.
Evan Goldberg
#8. I am not very relaxed about bad reviews. But I am resilient. I grieve, curse and swear, put on loud music, and get on with the next job.
Simon Schama
#9. Getting bad reviews or doing something that's not great is also really good for you as an actor. It also makes me feel as an actor that I've earned my stripes a bit.
Greta Gerwig
#10. What surprised me most about fame is how unpleasant it can be. I used to think it was going to be so fun. I got excited about the parties. You don't anticipate friends being jealous of you and critics giving your music bad reviews. Media and rumors - that stuff hurts.
Eve
#11. If you're not getting any bad reviews, you're not taking enough risks
Susan Egan
#13. You can't listen to what people who aren't musical have to say. When Anytime was released, I had bad reviews, and at first I was hurt. Your songs are like your children. You don't want to hear, 'Your kid is ugly.' But I knew the record was good and it would sell.
Brian McKnight
#14. I don't want to be a part of the demographics. I want to be an individual. I wear each of my films as a badge of pride. That's why I cherish all my bad reviews. If the critics start liking my movies, then I'm in deep trouble.
John Carpenter
#15. Bad reviews come with everything. I've been getting them my whole life.
Will Friedle
#16. In the 1970s, a lot of critics didn't understand video. I got a lot of bad reviews. But film-makers didn't understand what we were doing, either. There were actual fistfights between film-makers and video-makers. I was witness to one.
Bill Viola
#17. To me, I read good reviews in lots of papers and bad reviews in lots of papers.
Sheila Nevins
#19. I'm not one to get bad reviews.
Prince
#20. I was seeing a lot of really good things about Get Shorty when it came out, and my wife pointed out that if you validate the good reviews, you also have to validate the bad reviews.
Barry Sonnenfeld
#22. For instance, 'The Sixth Sense' had mediocre to bad reviews. Slowly, the audience pushed it and it received critical attention.
M. Night Shyamalan
#23. Understand That Bad Reviews Are a Sign That You're Relevant The only way you could never get any negative reviews would be if you were so incredibly irrelevant that no one thought you were worth talking or thinking about.
Sean Platt
#24. It's fine when you careen off disasters and terrifyingly bad reviews and rejection and all that stuff when you're young; your resilience is just terrific.
Harold Prince
#25. In my memoir, I admit that I've been as fearful of success as of failure. In fact, when 'Passages' was published, I so dreaded bad reviews that I ran away to Italy with a girlfriend and our children to hide out.
Gail Sheehy
#26. Bad reviews are the bane of an author's post-publication existence.
Nigel Hamilton
#27. Sometimes it can be useful to read your bad reviews.
Heidi Julavits
#28. If you read the good reviews you gotta read the bad reviews. I kind of think of it as like being a quarterback: you get way too much blame when it's bad and way too much credit when it's good.
David Fincher
#29. Bad reviews I've gotten never diminished the number of people in my audience; good reviews have never added to the number of people in my audience; be your own critic.
Frank Sinatra
#30. I don't spend sleepless nights over getting very bad reviews.
Werner Herzog
#31. I've done both theatre and film and the fact is if you start believing, if you start reading things and they're good reviews - you believe that and you're lost, and then you read bad reviews and you think that's true and you read that and you're lost.
Jenny Agutter
#32. It's hard enough doing something bold without jumping into your bad reviews.
Kenny Loggins
#33. I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews.
John Updike
#34. I think that I've got some pretty bad reviews on albums or songs that later proved themselves.
Carly Simon
#35. I've never had a movie that got great reviews. I've had movies that got different levels of good and bad reviews, but you can more or less count on plenty of bad reviews.
Wes Anderson
#36. People adore bad reviews. Nobody would be interested in reading the good ones.
Jay Rayner
#37. Self editing is the path to the dark side. Self editing leads to self delusion, self delusion leads to missed mistakes, missed mistakes lead to bad reviews. Bad reviews are the tools of the dark side.
Eric T. Benoit
#38. When you do comedy, you get impervious to good and bad reviews.
Adam McKay
#40. I have always read all my reviews, the bad along with the good (although you remember the bad much more than the good!). I am just too curious to see how it's playing with the audience, and I have a thick-enough skin to handle the less charitable assessments.
Frank Spotnitz
#41. You got to deal with reviews the same way you deal with your views, which I a long time ago stopped reading because the point is if you believe the good ones you have to believe the bad ones. It's kind of all or nothing.
Steven Soderbergh
#42. With all of my films if I get one bad review and a bunch of good reviews the bad one is the only one that will stay with me, which really sucks!
Peter Farrelly
#43. [about Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises] His characters are as shallow as the saucers in which they stack their daily emotions.
The New York Times
#44. Reviews are for readers, not writers. If I get a bad one, I shrug it off. If I get a good one, I don't believe it
William Meikle
#45. Even reading my first bad review was an awesome experience. It was cool because you make something and not everybody's going to like it. I felt like that kind of grew me up a little bit into a professional. I was a student filmmaker, and no one writes reviews about student films.
Ryan Coogler
#46. I'm probably my own harshest critic. If I get a hundred good reviews and one really bad one, it's that one out of a hundred that I remember. I think we actors are hard on ourselves, and I don't know why that is.
Tim Daly
#47. What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.
American novels, answered Lord Henry.
Oscar Wilde
#48. I'm used to getting reviews. I try not to read much because you'll always focus on the bad ones and not remember the good ones, so it can be a negative thing for a performer.
Sam Trammell
#49. To me [Edgar Allen Poe's] prose is unreadable - like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
Mark Twain
#50. [On The Catcher in the Rye] "This Salinger, he's a short story guy. And he knows how to write about kids. This book though, it's too long. Gets kind of monotonous. And he should've cut out a lot about these jerks and all that crumby school. They depress me. - James Stern
The New York Times
#51. My early reviews were so bad that I decided I didn't want to read them again.
Danielle Steel
#52. Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer. [1857]
Le Figaro
#53. You read some good reviews and then you read a bad one, and the bad one pisses you off but there's nothing you can do. It's just an opinion.
Simon Taylor-Davis
#54. Frankly, anybody who's going to kill themselves because of a bad review has no business writing a novel in the first place.
Robert Galbraith
#55. Since I got a really bad review when I was, like, 28 in 'The New York Times,' I don't read reviews anymore.
Amanda Peet
#56. From my close observation of writers ... they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.
Isaac Asimov
#57. Once you've put one of his [Henry James] books down, you simply can't pick it up again.
Mark Twain
#58. There are two kinds of reviews: Good ones and bad ones. Within that sliding scale there are two other categories: Favorable and Unfavorable.
Of course, I hope for all Good Reviews that are also Favorable - but how likely is that? If a review isn't favorable, I just hope is well-written.
R.S. Mellette
#59. A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Iris Murdoch
#60. 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
#61. I don't read reviews. I find them very distracting, whether they're good or bad.
Eve Best
#62. On the first movie we got good reviews, but we were still dealing with genre stuff. It's going away. Judge the movie - is it a good one or a bad one? We know we made a great movie and it's being judged for just being a good film.
Avi Arad
#63. All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.
Irwin Shaw
#64. I found out about reviews early on. They're mostly written by sad men on bad afternoons. That's probably why I'm less angry than some writers, who are so narcissistic they consider every line of every review, even a thoughtful one, as major treason.
Barry Hannah
#65. Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code ... a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name.
(Discussion at Woodruff Auditorium in Lawrence, KS; October 7, 2005.)
Salman Rushdie
#66. Protect your voice and your vision. If going on the Internet and reading Internet reviews is bad for you, don't do it. ... Do what gets you to write and not what blocks you. ... Don't take any guff off anybody.
Anne Rice
#67. I've started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I'd be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.
David Bowie
#68. Have you ever gotten a bad review, Master Huud?"
"Hundreds of them."
"Do they hurt?"
"Of course. But you get over it. Critics are just people, lad. They're entitled to their opinions. They're not the enemy."
"Who is the enemy?"
"Censors.
Katie Waitman
#69. [Middlemarch] is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole.
Henry James
#70. It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#71. Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
Mark Twain
#72. There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Fenimore Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now.
Mark Twain
#73. I don't read reviews or interviews or anything, just because I'm afraid; If I believed the good, then I'd believe the bad, and there will be bad.
Sia Furler
#74. I hear what people say, I read all the reviews, all the blogs, and I am always curious to hear it, because you can't always listen to the good press, you have to hear the bad press, too.
Eli Roth
#75. 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
#76. On a book by Henry James: Once you put it down, you simply can't pick it up.
Mark Twain
#77. In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
Oscar Wilde
#78. In the past, I've had my share of good reviews, but it's always the crazy, scary, weirdo guy. I don't even know how it happened. Look at me. I mean, when I'm naked, I look like a bald chicken. How did I get to be a scary bad guy?
Gary Oldman
#79. So, you're the man who can't spell 'fuck.'"
Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer after publishers had convinced Mailer to replace the word with a euphemism, 'fug,' in his 1948 book, "The Naked and the Dead.
Dorothy Parker
#80. I collect all the reviews of the films I turned down. And when they're bad - I have to smile.
Simone Signoret
#81. Writing is exhilarating, but reading reviews is not. I've been really devastated by 'good' reviews because they misunderstand the project of the book. It can be strangely galvanising to get a 'bad' one.
Eleanor Catton
#82. [Leaves of Grass is] monstrous because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect; because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages the taste.
Henry James
#83. One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
W. H. Auden
#84. Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it.
Moses Hadas
#85. All reviews should carry a Surgeon General's warning. The good ones turn your head, the bad ones break your heart.
David Ives
#86. I try not to read reviews because I know how sensitive I am and how debilitating it is and how it follows me around. If they're bad, you feel terrible, you feel worthless, no matter if you think they're wrong - and if they're good, it feels cheap and sleazy because you went looking for it.
Thao Nguyen
#87. I don't read reviews because if they're bad I'm devastated and if they're good I get a big head.
Kim Cattrall
#88. I don't read reviews, because if you believe the good ones, you have to believe the bad.
Kelli O'Hara
#89. Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#90. I really don't want somebody writing something positive about me if they don't believe in it. I'd rather somebody write something real mean. I like reading bad stuff, it gets me excited. In fact, the only reviews I keep are the bad ones 'cause I think they're the cool ones.
Patti Smith
#92. An oxymoronic combination of the tough and tender, [Of Mice and Men] will appeal to sentimental cynics, cynical sentimentalists ... Readers less easily thrown off their trolley will still prefer Hans Andersen.
[Time 1937]
Time-Life Books
#93. Envy isn't always green; it's often black and white!" (On book reviews - from an article written in 2013)
Eric J. Gates
#94. In Heaven all reviews will be favorable; here on earth, the publisher realizes, plausibility demands an occasional bad one, some convincing lump in all that leaven, and he accepts it somewhat as a theologian accepts Evil.
Randall Jarrell
#95. [About John Updike's Rabbit Run] The author fails to convince us that his puppets are interesting in themselves, or that their plight has implications that transcend their narrow world.
Chicago Tribune
#96. I tend to not only read reviews, but also every little stupid thing online. It's a very bad idea, and there's a lot of angry people in the world. And it's weird to absorb all that weirdness.
Charlie Kaufman
#97. Oh, great reviews are the worst. They mislead you more than the bad ones, because they only fuel your ego. Then you only want another one, like potato chips or something, and the best thing you get is fat and bloated. I'd rather just refuse, thanks.
Chazz Palminteri
#98. If a book isn't at least somewhat polarizing, it didn't say anything of value.
[Blog entry - November 1, 2014]
Ilona Andrews
#99. When the reviews are bad I tell my staff that they can join me as I cry all the way to the bank.
Liberace
#100. I know that an author must be brave enough to chop away clinging tentacles of good taste for the sake of a great work. But this is no great work, you see.
Dorothy Parker
