Quotes About Reviewers

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

#4. There is a secret and wholesome conviction in the heart of every man or woman who has written a book that it should be no easy matter for an intelligent reader to lay down that book unfinished. There is a pardonable impression among reviewers that half an hour in its company is sufficient.

Agnes Repplier

#5. The reviewers tear me apart. I bleed. I'm a favorite target. They go along for six months looking at movies, praying for rain, and then a new Sandra Dee movie comes out, and their eyes open, and they lick their lips. Before they've ever seen it.

Sandra Dee

#6. If the book's bad enough, they'll publish it, and if it's bad bad enough, the daily reviewers will love it, and it'll sell.

James Purdy

#7. Reviewers are certainly entitled to their own opinions. I've become buddies with enough writers and directors, and to be perfectly honest, the ones that have lasted a long time don't pay a lot of attention to the reviews.

Evan Daugherty

#8. If reviewers don't mention your work, it's probably better than if they do

Roger Deakins

#9. 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 ...

Ann Beattie

#10. I don't usually read my reviews. I've noticed older reviewers are much more bothered by the plot complications. Younger reviews don't seem to be bothered by the complications at all.

Heidi Julavits

#11. I thought I was attractive when I shot 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding.' Studio executives and movie reviewers let me know I had a confidence in my looks that was not shared by them.

Nia Vardalos

#12. Adieu, sucky speed-reading critics and reviewers!"
Terry Dare, gothic author in Blatty's book "Elsewhere", just before he crosses over.

William Peter Blatty

#13. 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.

Charles Churchill

#14. Some reviewers call my stories dark - and yes, there is violence and angst, and the stakes are high - but I like to think that the endings are satisfying and hopeful.

Carol Berg

#15. Of course it's fun writing about an egomaniac, but I know there are going to be reviewers who've never met me, who don't know anything about me, who are going to say this is autobiography: he's just changed the names of a few people, and the rest is totally as it was.

Michel Faber

#16. Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.

V.S. Pritchett

#17. Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.

Evelyn Waugh

#18. PLS Reviews from Five Star Reviewers!
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Keith Burns

#19. I don't really say much about reviewers. It's a very tough job to get all of the depth of a movie all at once.

Roland Joffe

#20. 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.

Charlotte Bronte

#21. The preface is the most important part of a book. Even reviewers read a preface.

Philip Guedalla

#22. This would be my first time wanting to slaughter a reader, but then again, I can pretend she's one of those cranky ass reviewers that think they are literary gods.

Adam Reese

#23. I think when you've had success, publishers and reviewers and readers are willing to let you try something new if you've already proven yourself. They're excited about what you're doing, you have people interested in it, and actually waiting for it. It's empowering.

Lois Lowry

#24. (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.

Bertrand Russell

#25. Peer reviewers go for orthodoxy ... Many of the great 19th-century discoveries were made by men who had independent wealth-Charles Darwin is the prototype. They trusted themselves.

James Black

#26. Constant rejection. No security. Career paths being dictated by freelance reviewers. And of course, the terror of the writing desk, of the blank page. Why is it so hard for our non-writer friends to understand this - that it's a job?

Darin Strauss

#27. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans.

Jane Austen

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

Barbara Kingsolver

#29. Reviewers and critics can be overly cynical. If something the least bit sentimental comes up, they'll often start flying off the handle. But I'm like, 'Wait a minute, you've had those times in your life. Everybody has.'

Gilbert Hernandez

#30. Eighty percent of the reviewers and authors of reviewed books in the New York Review of Books in 2013 were men, as were almost 80 percent of the 'notable deaths' reported in the New York Times in 2012.

Laura Bates

#31. You want to get your book to press. You rush it through. Revision number twenty - done. Do you really need twenty more? Yes. A half-baked book is a half-birthed child. It aborts, is put on life support; reviewers line the hall to pull the plug.

Chila Woychik

#32. I think reviewers are sexist ... This isn't to sound bitter, but I think you're more likely to get a critical kicking if you're a woman. I just think that's a fact. I really think less value is put in general on women's voices, across the board.

Marian Keyes

#33. In my ideal world, my next novel would have a first printing of, say, 2,500 hardcovers for reviewers, libraries, collectors, and autograph hounds. The publisher could print more copies if they get low. And simultaneously, or six weeks later, the book would be available in paperback.

Christina Baker Kline

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

Bobby Farrelly

#35. Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Harold Clurman

#36. Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#37. Reviewers have called my books 'novels in verse.' I think of them as written in prose, but I do use stanzas. Stanza means 'room' in Latin, and I wanted there to be 'room' - breathing opportunities to receive thoughts and have time to come out of them before starting again at the left margin.

Virginia Euwer Wolff

#38. Writers take words seriously - perhaps the last professional class that does - and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.

John Updike

#39. Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.

Lenny Bruce

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

Carroll O'Connor

#41. Lazy reviewers look up other people's reviews and they write the same thing, so you get people writing crap based on crap.

Joni Mitchell

#42. I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros-but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds.

John Irving

#43. This volume follows in the same format as its predecessors, except that, at the suggestion of two reviewers of a previous volume, Biblical verses are identified, when recognized, for the benefit of our un-Biblical younger generation.

George Fenwick Jones

#44. I don't care what reviewers think. If somebody hates a performance of mine, I kind of get a kick out of it. It amuses me when critics take something so irrelevant as a movie so seriously.

Stephen Baldwin

#45. As long as there are readers to be delighted with calumny, there will be found reviewers to calumniate.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

Henry Blodget

#47. I think reviewers have become particularly venomous because, in a way, the power has been sucked from them. A 15-year-old can write a review on the Internet and it means as much as Roger Ebert's review, and that just makes Roger Ebert mad, so he comes out harder and stronger.

Todd Phillips

#48. As a children's author, reviewers are generally very nice to you. I only ever wrote one adult book and received such a kicking for it that I was in trauma for the next six months.

Anthony Horowitz

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

Ayana Mathis

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

Chila Woychik

#51. I have been extremely lucky with reviewers and critics throughout my career.

Kate Smith

#52. I can't write a scene unless I've visualized it. Unless I can actually see it, and that's why a lot of reviewers have said my books are very cinematic, because I actually do see them before I write them.

Eric Van Lustbader

#53. Reviewers, critics, guest editors... Such people may have an eye for literary conventions and contrivances, allusions and innovations on the art. But what are their tastes based on? Do they tend to choose work that most resembles theirs?

Amy Tan

#54. There were also some cruel reviews by women, but the tone of the male reviewers, sometimes hysterical, was different. I have suffered, but I don't want to name names-but there have been men who have seemed to want to destroy me or my writing, men I don't even know.

Marguerite Young

#55. I wonder sometimes why the U.S. reviewers are more negative towards turn-based battle systems.

Yuji Horii

#56. 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.

Art Spiegelman

#57. It never stops me from saying what I want to say about Ethiopia, the fact that a tour company is paid for me to go there. Book reviewers don't pay for the books they review.

John Gimlette

#58. 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.

Bobby Farrelly

#59. I did think reviewers were supposed to be polite about story collections - collections are rather delicate creatures in the literary environment - but not everybody got this memo, I guess.

Lorrie Moore

#60. Q: What literary complexities do you find most interesting? That is, what do you like most to "solve," so to speak, as a novelist?
A: One wishes to create characters who will speak directly to the minds of comparative literature professors and intelligent book reviewers.

Gilbert Sorrentino

#61. Some reviewers have read this as cynicism but I don't see it that way. When I say "I am so sick / of pretending to be me," it's exhaustion at the everyday performance, in life, in art, even in our most intimate encounters.

Randall Mann

#62. I've had movies bomb with terrible reviews, I've had movies make a lot of money with terrible reviews, I've had movies get good reviews and make money. And I like it best when the movies do well and the reviewers like them.

Judd Apatow

#63. Whatever the reviewers feel about 'The Casual Vacancy', it is what I wanted it to be, and you can't say fairer than that as a writer.

J.K. Rowling

#64. I think being a woman and writing frankly about violence has gotten me some attention, and as someone who wants people to read my books, I can't complain about that attention, but it does puzzle me that this is something reviewers focus on.

Karin Slaughter

#65. 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.

Antony Beevor

#66. In LA I was watching At the Movies with Ebert and Roper, it was, nice to see them differentiate between the subject matter and the art form of making the film, and they both gave it thumbs up, and I was kind of pleased at their honesty as far as reviewers go.

Michael Berryman

#67. Something Blue" is now available on Netgalley for reviewers!

Dianne Christner

#68. There is no debate that social media is a great tool for networking with others in our industry. It can lead to friendships, support, and serendipitous connections with reviewers, agents, reporters, or editors.

M.J. Rose

#69. I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.

Vladimir Nabokov

#70. Reviewers are the worst laughers in the world.

Chris O'Dowd

#71. I might also say, regarding reviews and reviewers, that I have yet to read a review of any of my own books which I could not have written much better myself.

Edward Abbey

#72. 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

#73. I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.

Billy Collins

#74. 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

#75. 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.

Anthony Burgess

#76. In my first story, 'Mr. Mysterious & Company' ... I was asked to take out some of the humor because editors were afraid reviewers would dismiss the book as a joke. Today, humor is enjoyed and no longer regarded as literary brummagem.

Sid Fleischman

#77. Richard Price got a million dollar advance on one fake film book based on a paragraph outline and is able to seduce gullible White reviewers who know less about ghetto life than he. The New York Times has devoted more space to Price's tourist, ghetto writing than to any Black writer in history.

Ishmael Reed

#78. Reviewers said Ghost Country was rich, astonishing and affecting in the way it blended comedy, magic, and a gritty urban realism in a breathtaking ride along Chicago's mean streets.

Sara Paretsky

#79. I don't read the reviews because they're too horrible and the reviewers have not been big supporters of mine over the years, probably because I make these big populist movies and they hate it.

Rob Cohen

#80. Memoir today is like one big game of misery poker: The more outlandish, outrageous, or just plain out-there the recounted life, the more likely the book is to attract the attention of reviewers, talk-show bookers, and, ultimately, the public.

Ben Yagoda

#81. I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.

Stephen Jay Gould

#82. 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.

Christopher Darden

#83. I never engage negatively with reviewers. If someone says something that enrages me, I do what I do on stage. I make a joke about myself and move on. Sometimes people say things that are manifestly wrong or even apparently malicious. That's fine, too. It's a response.

Nick Harkaway

#84. With a poetry book I can send 100 copies out to reviewers and other people, and even do it in advance and get their response. It's difficult with iPad: how do you send it out for free, and how do you even disseminate it before it goes into their store?

Felix Dennis

#85. If you read reviews that you think by their very nature are not respectful of the actresses involved or not appreciating the work as it should be, I think you should write to reviewers or comment and say, "Are you kidding me?"

Romola Garai

#86. Book reviewers are little old ladies of both sexes.

John O'Hara

#87. 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

#88. 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.

Garry Wills

#89. Reevaluate your abilities each time when you have been offered to review
an article. And say no thanks if the topic doesn't belong to the field of your expertise.

Eraldo Banovac

#90.

[Blog post, March 10, 2014]

K.J. Charles

#91. 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

#92. Authors, reviews are not for you. They are not for you. Authors, reviews are not for you.

Stacia Kane

#93. 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

#94. Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.

Joan Didion

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

Edward Abbey

#96. Besides, it was all very well to criticise the works of others, but in fact it was quite hard, he discovered, to tell a story.

Iain Pears

#97. Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review.

James Russell Lowell

#98. [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

#99. The worst problem of peer reviewing is its time consuming nature.

Eraldo Banovac

#100. Book reviewer: Very often a writer who has never been published taking out their frustrations on a writer who has.

Raul Ramos Y Sanchez