Quotes About Book Reviews

#1. The authors of book reviews would consider themselves dishonored were they to mention, as they should, the subject of the book.

Louis Aragon

#2. The work is at such a high level and is so well executed, it really is a matter of taste ... [Source: Project Runway - but consider, applied to the theme of book reviews, it seems apropos!]

Tim Gunn

#3. The whole family is a bunch of dangerous freaks ... Most are ex-cons or junkies or deranged from inbreeding. Five have died violently, three are back in prison, two have gone insane from untreated venereal disease, and one writes book reviews.

Tim Dorsey

#4. Aside from my mom, Carla, and my tutors, the world barely know I exist. I mean, I exist online. I have online friends and my Tumblr book reviews, but that's not the same as being a real person who can be visited by strange boys bearing Bundt cakes.

Nicola Yoon

#5. I mean, when you're tired of book reviews, you're tired of life.

Lev Grossman

#6. A novelist must wrestle with all mysteries and strangeness of life itself, and anyone who dies not wish to accept that grand, bone-chilling commission should write book reviews, editorials, or health-insurance policies instead.

Pat Conroy

#7. I have a confession to make. For years, I earned a living - or a sort of living - writing negative book reviews.

Lee Siegel

#8. Envy isn't always green; it's often black and white!" (On book reviews - from an article written in 2013)

Eric J. Gates

#9. Shorter work - personal essays and book reviews - allow me to take a break from working on a book, which is good for the book and for its author.

Kathryn Harrison

#10. My generation was not only maligned in book reviews and attacked in graduate school but we lived to see our adored and adorable daughters wonder why feminism had become a dirty word.

Erica Jong

#11. I have turned off Google Alerts and don't Google my name or my pen names. I don't go on message boards. I don't read my book reviews.

J.A. Konrath

#12. If I like a book, I tend to read the author's entire collection. But I choose mainly through personal recommendations, general word of mouth and book reviews.

Randa Abdel-Fattah

#13. Reading book reviews is like asking other people to chew your food for you.

Ron Brackin

#14. Why do I do this every Sunday? Even the book reviews seem to be the same as last week's. Different books same reviews.

John Osborne

#15. Commercial books don't even get covered. The reason why so many book reviews go out of business is because they cover a lot of stuff that nobody cares about. Imagine if the movie pages covered none of the big movies and all they covered were movies that you couldn't even find in the theater?

James Patterson

#16. We set up a beta site, a test site, with movie, music and book reviews. If you're reading them and you want to buy a book or a ticket for a movie that's reviewed on the site, you can do that without leaving our site.

Jay Chiat

#17. Note that the #1 Top Reviewer at Amazon (4550 book reviews) is Harriet Klausner, formerly an acquisitions librarian in Pennsylvania. This just goes to show that librarians were destined to rule the Web.

Peter Morville

#18. I will only start taking book reviews seriously from the day that books are able to review readers.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#19. She passed her New York Reviews on to Troy without giving them a glance; she told him she thought there was something perverted about book reviews that were longer than the books they were reviewing.

Anne Tyler

#20. I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

#21. 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

#22. Book reviews have never helped me. Most of them erred in their interpretations and their work has been a waste of time.

Manuel Puig

#23. We sometimes reveal how ignorant or bored we were when we read a book by giving it 5-stars.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#24. One book led to another; reading during my free time became a new fondness. Nonetheless, there was never much consideration of being a scholar when beginning to do so. The titles I was turning to seemed to speak directly to me, and soon the reviews became one of my favorite things to do.

Jessica Connor

#25. 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

#26. Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about critics.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#27. Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it.

Moses Hadas

#28. One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. The truth is that I'm never sure how any of my books will be received, and because I can be thin-skinned, I try not to read too many reviews when a book first comes out.

Charles Baxter

#32. On a book by Henry James: Once you put it down, you simply can't pick it up.

Mark Twain

#33. [P]ersonally, I know I'd prefer to read an honest review by someone who has no reason to lie, than a book reviewer who has an employer and a publishing house to keep happy.

Catherine Ryan Howard

#34. 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

#35. A writer hopes never to offend, but if he must, pray let him offend the gods before the reviewers.

Chila Woychik

#36. There is nothing like a good negative review to sell a book.

Hugh Barbour

#37. The reason for writing that essay was less a personal agenda than an attempt to explain my unease with the general label of "immigrant literature" after I had read quite a number of reviews (in different countries) involving books written by 'immigrants.'

Sasa Stanisic

#38. Rarely do we invest the time to open the book of another's life. When we do, we are usually surprised to find its cover so misleading and its reviews so flawed.

Richard Paul Evans

#39. I read reviews a lot for the audiobooks I narrate, so I've seen the comments about how readers would do anything to make book boyfriends real. Here I am, convinced I'm standing in the arms of one, and I'm about to walk away from him.

Colleen Hoover

#40. My book sales are way down today. Also, I've received two scathing reviews. One of them calls me a purveyor of insipid wet-dreams.

Nenia Campbell

#41. Material Witness - book 1 (**Named one of Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2012) Nothing But Trouble (Contemporary Western Romance)

Lisa Mondello

#42. Writing blog posts is totally freeing in a whole new way for me. I'm not writing it for any editor, and I'm not being paid, so I can say whatever I want. I don't have to justify the cost of a book to readers; they get it for free, so expectations are naturally low. (And no one-star reviews!)

Kate Christensen

#43. I've never yet read a review of one of my own books that I couldn't have written much better myself.

Edward Abbey

#44. I love getting fan mail. Often, as a writer, you never know what your readers think of a book ... you get critical reviews and sales figures, but none of that is the same as knowing you've made a person stay up all night reading, or helped them have a good cry, or really touched their life.

Jodi Picoult

#45. I've read quite a few readers' reviews of my book on Amazon, saying, 'Ah, he criticises the free market, he advocates central planning.' I don't do that for a minute! But this is our black and white, dichotomous way of thinking - which has really been harmful.

Ha-Joon Chang

#46. Love can give you the most exhilarating wonderful highs at times ...
... Then there will be dives that will take all you have just to hold on ...
Quote on the Title Page of Love TORN Asunder

Elizabeth Funderbirk

#47. If a book isn't at least somewhat polarizing, it didn't say anything of value.
[Blog entry - November 1, 2014]

Ilona Andrews

#48. I've sold too many books to get good reviews anymore. There's a lot of jealousy, because [reviewers] think they can write a good novel or a best-seller and get frustrated when they can't. I've learned to despise them.

John Grisham

#49. I have had a lot of readers of my book tell me that they like it, but so far only two reviews have been listed. Could you help?

Rollis Fontenot Jr

#50. Choosing from every book ever published seems like a dream, until you're forced to sift through hundreds of thousands of titles on your Kindle, and all the reviews attached to them, hoping to find something good.

David Sax

#51. I apologize if I've rated your book but not left a review. I've noticed lately that some of my reviews are disappearing after a day or two. It may be a tech issue, might be operator error (me) but I always intend to leave at least a short comment along with a rating.

Chris Norbury

#52. The only reason I didn't kill myself after I read the reviews of my first book was because we have two rivers in New York and I couldn't decide which one to jumo into.

Wilfrid Sheed

#53. I am honored and humbled by the fine reviews my new book "Why We Lover Serial Killers" is receiving.

Scott A. Bonn

#54. I abide by a rule concerning reviews: I will never ask, neither in writing nor in person, that a word be put in about my book ... One feels cleaner this way. When someone asks that his book be reviewed he risks running up against a vulgarity offensive to authorial sensibilities.

Anton Chekhov

#55. Most books reviews aren't very well-written. They tend to be more about the reviewer than the book.

Tibor Fischer

#56. I do not believe writers should read reviews of their own books, and I do not. If one is not careful one is soon writing to please reviewers and not their audience or themselves.

Louis L'Amour

#57. Either way, you wrote the book and now you're complaining about the reviews I'm giving it," I quipped.
"Fair enough." He held up his hands, "I'm going to start writing the sequel which will be considerably less narcissistic. Will you read it?"
"Only if every other girl on campus hasn't.

Tarryn Fisher

#58. Sometimes writing about a TV show, or a movie, or a book, is the most honest way to write about yourself.

Aaron Burch

#59. I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.

Jeanette Winterson

#60. The vast majority of writers out there, they finish their books, and no one cares whether their book is late or ever comes out at all. And then it comes out, and two reviews are published, and it sells 12 copies.

George R R Martin

#61. The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.

Toni Morrison

#62. The early reviews of Dick Cheney's memoir have not evaluated the book, but instead have used its publication as an occasion for attacks on Cheney and his record, with general assaults on George W. Bush's administration thrown in for good measure.

Elliott Abrams

#63. I get thousands of letters, and they give me a feeling of how each book is perceived. Often I think I have written about a certain theme, but by reading the letters or reviews, I realise that everybody sees the book differently.

Isabel Allende

#64. That said, wow. This book is just so full of nasty and kinky encounters and voyeuristic thrills that it blew me away.
Sylvia Storm E Read Erotica Reviews

Sasha Holden

#65. Books are savaged and careers destroyed by surly snots who write anonymous reviews and publishers can't be bothered to protest this institutionalized corruption.

Warren Murphy

#66. With a hardcover, you get two chances, a year apart, for the book to make an impact - often with a new cover featuring artfully crafted snippets of reviews, a new marketing campaign and maybe even a new publisher.

Christina Baker Kline

#67. If you like a book you read, tell someone. If you hate it, tell em harder.

J.D. Mader

#68. People who've read my reviews know my tastes, know how I approach a book, know my background. I can write with believable authority. It doesn't mean I'm always right.

Michael Dirda

#69. [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

#70. Of all reviews, the crushing review is the most popular, as being the most readable.

Anthony Trollope

#71. I write what I want and how I want. Reviews do not need to be condescending nor do they need to tell me to read your book (if you're a fellow author). Either you like the books or you don't. That's all there is to it.

Amanda Byrd

#72. Reviewing a book written by someone you're living with and sleeping with is, needless to say, wrong.

Jill Lepore

#73. 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

#74. Thrilled about my giveaway winners! Book will be mailed Tuesday (after the holiday! Hope you enjoy Libby's Journey and come back for more! Share with friends and I'd appreciate reviews!

DiDi Hendley

#75. If you have the indecency to steal my book, at least have the decency to write a review.

Grea Alexander

#76. 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

#77. It is much easier to maintain and bolster views that we currently hold than it is to create and develop new ones. Referred to as the confirmation bias, we seek out

Brainy Book Reviews

#78. Carlin does a rare thing for a self-help book: gives useful guidance by supplying readers with the tools necessary for change." --Barry Silverstein, "Foreword Reviews

Barry Silverstein

#79. The handwritten pages make for fun giveaways. If someone reviews one of my books online, like on Amazon or Goodreads, they can notify me through my web site, and I'll send them an original page. They can see my creative process in all its scribbly glory.

Brian Pinkerton

#80. 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

#81. Just remember: it's worth all the negative reviews to get your book in the hands of those who'll love it.

Kira Hawke

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

Edward Abbey

#83. In the case of 'Goon Squad,' which sold slowly for a long time despite the good reviews, those 'best of 2010' lists were pivotal, and made the book really sell.

Jennifer Egan

#84. I don't read my reviews, I measure them.

Arnold Bennett

#85. great characters, a real escape, such a fun and exciting read. Really enjoyed this book, cant wait for the next.

LOVE GREAT REVIEWS .

Genevieve Smith