Top 43 Quotes About Book Critics
#1. I'm not one of your knockabout, knuckle-scarred, Internet-controversy-courting book critics. Occasionally I stumble into controversy accidentally, but not because I enjoy it. It's probably just because I'm a weird person.
Lev Grossman
#2. How a big majority of book critics and authors have come to believe and to teach that no book is true to life unless it is true to the worst in life, God knows ...
Gene Stratton-Porter
#3. Such a big majority of book critics and authors have begun to teach, whether they really believe it or not, that no book is TRUE TO LIFE unless it is true to the WORST IN LIFE, that the idea has infected even the women.
Gene Stratton-Porter
#4. Children read books, not reviews," he wrote. "They don't give a hoot about the critics." And: "When a book is boring, they yawn openly, without any shame or fear of authority." Best of all - and to the relief of authors everywhere - children "don't expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity.
Steven D. Levitt
#5. You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven't done what I do. Most book reviewers haven't written 11 novels. Many of them haven't written one.
John Irving
#6. A writer is a genius not when critics say so, but when her or his book pierces your heart and rips off your blindness with its brilliance.
Ksenia Anske
#7. Aldous Huxley took the drug mescaline and then chronicled his experience in the book The Doors of Perception. Now, I don't actually think that's the first thing he wrote: he probably wrote 'my brain is melting' ten thousand times, but it was the book that the critics latched on to.
Bill Bailey
#8. Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#9. The best critics do not worry about what the author might think. That would be like a detective worrying about what a suspect might think. Instead, they treat the reader as an intelligent friend, and describe the book as honestly, and as entertainingly, as possible.
Craig Brown
#10. He'd stolen his philosophy of editing from the old New Critics - it's just about the book. Not the author, not the market, not the reader ... one judged a book only by the book.
Tiffany Reisz
#11. We can already say emphatically that there is no longer any solid basis for dating any book of the New Testament after about A.D. 80, two full generations before the date between 130 and 150 given by the more radical New Testament critics of today.
William F. Albright
#12. Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.
Edward Abbey
#13. I have argued about the future of fiction with jaded novelists, far-seeing postmodernists, technologists, television critics. The argument that future generations will not know the pleasures of the novel has been a staple of book reviewing since at least 1960.
Russell Smith
#14. The biggest critics of my books are the people who never read them.
Jackie Collins
#15. When criticism doesn't make sense, it is usually coming from a different place.
Shannon L. Alder
#17. In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, a lack! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit?
Aubrey Beardsley
#18. It is quite too common a practice, both in readers and the more superficial class of critics, to judge a book by what it is not, a matter much easier to determine than what it is.
James Russell Lowell
#19. What makes a good book?
Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.
Jane Yolen
#20. But in the book," I say, "the mockingbird is supposed to be a symbol of innocence. That's why it's a sin to kill one."
"Who says it's a symbol of innocence?" asks Mort.
"Teachers," I tell him. "Book reviewers, critics --"
"Wikipedia," Elena calls from behind the window display.
Paul Acampora
#21. Most critics agree with the seventeenth-century printer who gave them to the world, that the Mutabilitie Cantos seem to be part of some following book of The Faerie Queene.
Janet Spens
#22. The vehemence with which certain critics have chosen not simply to criticize what I've written, but to challenge my writing this story at all, speaks of what the book is about: fear of disapproval.
Joyce Maynard
#23. 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.
Chuck Klosterman
#24. Son of Lady Chatterley's Lover had obvious commercial advantages (as a title for this book), but it impugned the marital status of my parents, something that enough critics were already doing.
Jack Paar
#25. Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.
W. H. Auden
#26. Don't let anyone discourage you from writing. If you become a professional writer, there are plenty of editors, reviewers, critics, and book buyers to do that.
Jane Yolen
#27. What do you do when people don't get what you're doing, when they're confused by a book, or a direction you're going in? When the critics don't like it." The answer was a brief pause, then: "Fuck 'em.
Anonymous
#28. A. Critics: people who make monuments out of books. b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments. c. Poets: people who raze monuments. d. Publishers: people who sell rubble. e. Readers: people who buy it.
Cynthia Ozick
#29. Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.
Ethan Coen
#30. Adieu, sucky speed-reading critics and reviewers!"
Terry Dare, gothic author in Blatty's book "Elsewhere", just before he crosses over.
William Peter Blatty
#31. When I'm writing, I am lost in my book. Except family and close friends, I don't care about what critics, publishers or readers might think.
Amish Tripathi
#32. I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely ignored.
Anais Nin
#33. My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style.
Ishmael Reed
#34. When I started blogging in 2004, I responded to every comment no matter how nasty the reader was. I was generally polite, believing that these critics would be so charmed by my professionalism that they would see the error of their misogynist ways and swiftly run out to read a bell hooks book. Ha!
Jessica Valenti
#35. One battle doesn't make a campagin, but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole war.
Ernest Hemingway,
#36. To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.
Nelson Algren
#37. Proust is famous for his rhapsodies on hawthorns but his book has only three of these, whereas there are thirteen scenes in brothels, one especially detailed episode running to more than forty pages. Few critics mention the brothels but they are more fun than the hawthorns.
Michael Foley
#38. What with the reviews of critics, the sarcasms of one's friends, the reproaches of one's own taste, there's precious little peace after publishing a book ...
Winifred Holtby
#39. It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.
Samuel Johnson
#40. 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
#41. That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#42. Criticism is like dissecting a dead frog," Caleb said when the book was published. "They're examining all the guts and shit and organs, when the thing that really matters, whatever it was that animated the body, has long since left. It does nothing for the art.
Kevin Wilson
#43. With a few exceptions, the critics of children's books are remarkably lenient souls ... Most of us assume there is something goodin every child; the critics go from this to assume there is something good in every book written for a child. It is not a sound theory.
Katharine Sergeant Angell White
