Quotes About Reviewing Books

#1. My governing principle as a critic is to call attention solely to books and writers that merit such attention, and to avoid whenever possible reviewing books "negatively" except in those instances in which the "negative" is countered by an admiring consideration of earlier books by the same author.

Joyce Carol Oates

#2. One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

#3. Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, blacks review blacks, etc.

Alexander Theroux

#4. Brambleclaw turned to Squirrelflight first. "Will you fight beside me?"
Their eyes met for a long moment. "Always," she meowed.

Erin Hunter

#5. Book reviewing dates only to the eighteenth century, when, for the first time, there were so many books being printed that magazines - they were new, too - started printing essays about them.

Jill Lepore

#6. It's not easy to learn a new existence...
...but if you're desperate enough...
...and mean enough...
...it's possible.

Stephen King

#7. He exuded wisdom-even the wisest ... were pale, flickering candles next to the nourishing solar illumination of [his] insights.

Aprilynne Pike

#8. Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

George Orwell

#9. Death is the most misunderstood phenomenon. People have thought of death as the end of life. That is the first, basic misunderstanding.

Rajneesh

#10. 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

#11. The Central Indian Trifakirs, though something of a pest, were quite harmless. They always appeared in threes, of course, and made a practice of handing out muddle-headed philosophical tracts.

Walter Moers

#12. Back in the day, coming out was something very personal. You began by acknowledging the truth, first to yourself, then to close family and friends. Those of us more in the public spotlight, though, also had to 'come out' to the press.

George Takei

#13. What I enjoy about reviewing and writing for newspapers and periodicals is simply the chance to talk about all kinds of books and lots of them.

Michael Dirda

#14. I embellish the truth of their lives with the lies of my imagination.

Charlie Lovett

#15. Don't always do to others what you would like them to do to you - their tastes could be very different from yours.

Fernando Savater

#16. One improvement I have learned from my childhood experience with my father: I do not threaten punishment in the morning. That was awful. Late into the night I would lie awake tossing and wondering what he was going to do to me. Usually he did nothing. A quiet, impressive 'talking to' was all I got.

Lincoln Steffens

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

Jill Lepore

#18. There had been a time when I'd believed my power was evil, but God didn't seem to feel that way, so until He changed His mind, I just had faith that my power came from the right side.

Laurell K. Hamilton

#19. What would have become of Ohio State if I said everything? Half the team would have been suspended, and it would have been worse for everybody. I was like, 'Why don't I just take it?'

Maurice Clarett

#20. I love crime procedurals. I always have. I love cop shows.

Jonathan Nolan

#21. As a mighty river which when properly harnessed by dams and canals, creates a vast reservoir of water, prevents famine and provides abundant power for industry; so also the mind, when controlled, provides a reservoir of peace and generates abundant energy for the human uplift.

B.K.S. Iyengar