Top 68 Reviewer Quotes
#1. Book reviewer: Very often a writer who has never been published taking out their frustrations on a writer who has.
Raul Ramos Y Sanchez
#2. I've always liked an easygoing, colloquial style. I like the kind of reviewer who is essentially a fellow reader, an enthusiast, a fan.
Michael Dirda
#3. I've read a lot of bad books. I used to review books for a living, and when you're a reviewer you read tons of terrible books.
John Green
#4. I will say overwhelmingly what means so much more to me than the opinion of one reviewer are the letters I get from fans who tell me how a particular book has changed their life.
Jodi Picoult
#5. [O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#6. The worst disgrace that can befall a producer is an unkind notice from a New York reviewer. When this happens, the producer becomes a pariah in Hollywood. He is shunned by his friends, thrown into bankruptcy, and like a Japanese electing hara-kiri, he commits suttee.
S.J Perelman
#7. I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been dismayed by a critic's bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked or thanked a reviewer for a review.
Vladimir Nabokov
#8. I love to read, but I'm not a reviewer. I'll leave the reviewing to someone else. Suffice it to say, if I'm reading your book, I'm loving it.
John Inman
#9. What I expect of a movie reviewer is that he should love cinema as much as I do.
Patrice Leconte
#10. When I began to read as an adult, I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.
Hilary Mantel
#11. 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
#12. [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
#13. Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.
Richard Holt Hutton
#14. A reviewer's lot is not always an easy one. I can remember flogging myself to finish Harold Brodkey's 'The Runaway Soul' despite the novel's consummate, unmitigated tedium.
Michael Dirda
#15. Some reviewer might be out there saying, obviously Edge of Darkness didn't come off because of the script, blah blah blah, but everybody has read the script, except the journalist attacking it.
William Monahan
#16. Some movie I was in, I forget which one, some awful little movie, a reviewer said, What is Jessica Walter doing in this movie? And I said, Hello? Trying to make a living?
Jessica Walter
#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. What Hitchens should have written is: I wouldn't know the difference between conceptualism and realism, essentially and accidentally ordered causal series, Aristotle and Hume, etc., even if I were intellectually honest; but then, neither will the book reviewer at the New York Times, so who cares?
Edward Feser
#19. I wouldn't call myself a 'literary critic,' just a book reviewer.
Neel Mukherjee
#20. Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was.
Jackson Pollock
#21. Literary Teas are constantly in a state of flux. The uninitiated gravitates toward the author, the author toward the editor or publisher, the publisher toward the reviewer, and the reviewer, in desperation, toward another drink.
Mark Kurlansky
#22. I don't believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well.
James Dickey
#23. Any debut novel is usually a case of spitting into the wind - or, just maybe, casting your bread upon the waters. Without an established audience in place, first-time authors have to hope for resonant word of mouth and a receptive reviewer or three.
Paul Di Filippo
#24. How much of a book review is about the reviewer? Sometimes it's mostly about the reviewer!
Kathryn Harrison
#25. The main advantage of being a reviewer is that you read a lot. A lot of books get sent to you, and you have an amazing vantage point from which to observe what's going on in contemporary fiction - not only genre stuff, the whole spectrum.
Lev Grossman
#26. Let's face it: Sadness and evil are always more believable than happiness and love. When a movie reviewer calls a film "realistic," everyone knows what that means
it means the movie has an unhappy ending.
Chuck Klosterman
#27. Every true artist should look upon a review without judgment, anger or disdain, with the realization that the reviewer has exposed far more of their true selves in their words, than you have, in your art.
Robert Black
#28. Reviewer: 'One of your themes was very similar to one of Beethoven's!' Brahms replied, 'Of course it is. Everyone steals - the important thing is to do it brilliantly.
Johannes Brahms
#29. I read the GAO report, and it reminds me of a review I read of Lady Chatterley's Lover in the magazine Field and Stream. The reviewer of that book knew as much about the real purpose of Lady Chatterley's Lover as the GAO knows about the design and development of submarines.
Sherry Sontag
#30. [Reviewing the New York City Telephone Directory] But it is the opinion of the present reviewer that the weakness of plot is due to the great number of characters which clutter up the pages. The Russian school is responsible for this.
Robert Benchley
#31. The reviewer is a singularly detested enemy because he is, unlike the hapless artist, invulnerable.
Carroll O'Connor
#32. There was one reviewer from the 'New York Times,' I forget his name, who said I was 'death warmed over.' I wrote him back that I knew more about death than he did. The 'Times' fired him, put him in the cooking department!
James Rosenquist
#33. Come now, what's a reviewer?" I reasoned. "One who reads quickly, arrogantly, but never wisely ...
David Mitchell
#34. I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending.
Jamaica Kincaid
#35. 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
#36. The truth is, my folk-lore friends and my Saturday Reviewer differ with me on the important problem of the origin of folk-tales. They think that a tale probably originated where it was found.
Joseph Jacobs
#37. Memoirs have at their heart a content that "happened" to someone in real life. Is that what you are itching at in your question, so that if you are a reviewer or you are writing a critique you might feel as if you are stepping on someone's actual face?
Lidia Yuknavitch
#38. I couldn't give a sh*t what they have to say. As soon as I go home and see my husband [James Thornton of Holby Blue fame] and pick up my dog and cuddle him, that's all that matters. I couldn't care if some theatre reviewer thinks my American accent sounds a bit Welsh.
Joanna Page
#39. Before she married my father, my mother was a film reviewer for The Akron Beacon Journal - a small newspaper.
Jim Jarmusch
#40. A reviewer once commented that my urban fantasy novels were paced more like epic fantasy, in that they relied on complex world-building and a gradual immersion in the lives of the characters.
Laura Anne Gilman
#41. If a reviewer is beating me up, I just say, 'Oh well, my writing is not to his or her taste.' And that's as far as it goes. Because I will simultaneously read a review where somebody says, 'Oh my God, I had so much fun reading this book and I learned so much.'
Dan Brown
#42. I think that curiosity happened on these reviews where I was just a guest of the reviewer, because it introduced me to new cuisines and to the idea of cooking as a mechanism for studying other cultures and understanding other parts of the world.
Ted Allen
#43. For Thanksgiving, a quote from my book, The Restaurant Reviewer, with deepest thanks for all the bounty:
In the kitchen here ingredients are cherished. This restaurant remembers that food tastes good.
Nao Hauser
#44. 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
#45. Is it not clear that a reviewer's psyche, like an iceberg, is seven-eighths beneath the surface?
Delmore Schwartz
#46. Evelyn's New Age daughter will discover that a good shag beats hugging a guru any day.
- Helen Falconer, book reviewer for The Guardian
Deborah Moggach
#47. A writer should not review a book. A reviewer should not write.
Bhaskar Sharma
#49. I've been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can't remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.
Anton Chekhov
#50. The plot is so tired that even this reviewer, who in infancy was let drop by a nurse with the result that she has ever since been mystified by amateur coin tricks, was able to guess the identity of the murderer from the middle of the book.
Dorothy Parker
#51. I was on the junior team when I was a freshman, that's how good I was. But I wasn't on my eighth-grade team, because some coach - some Grammy, some reviewer, some fashion person, some blah blah blah - they're all the same as that coach.
Kanye West
#52. I don't think of myself as a critic at all. I'm a reviewer and essayist. I mainly hope to share with others my pleasure in the books and authors I write about, though sometimes I do need to cavil and point out shortcomings.
Michael Dirda
#53. It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.
Edward Abbey
#54. Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.
John Steinbeck
#55. Some book reviewer whose name I forget recently called me a 'vicious misanthrope' ... or maybe it was a 'cynical misanthrope' ... but either way, he (or she) was right; and what got me this way was politics.
Hunter S. Thompson
#56. Over the years, more than one reviewer has described my fantasy series, 'A Song of Ice and Fire', as historical fiction about history that never happened, flavoured with a dash of sorcery and spiced with dragons. I take that as a compliment.
George R R Martin
#57. 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
#58. I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.
John Banville
#59. This is Mindy. Malia was reading her book in Hawaii." My book! Malia Obama was reading my book! The one Amazon reviewer "My2Cents" called "sort of meh"! I was walking on air.
Mindy Kaling
#60. Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
Kurt Vonnegut
#61. Most books reviews aren't very well-written. They tend to be more about the reviewer than the book.
Tibor Fischer
#62. Life is made up of strange coincidences," said Thorndyke. "Nobody but a reviewer of novels is ever really surprised at a coincidence.
R. Austin Freeman
#63. Whenever a text-book is written of real educational worth, you may be quite certain that some reviewer will say that it will be difficult to teach from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. It it were easy, the book ought to be burned.
Alfred North Whitehead
#64. My mother had not acted for ten years. Not since a reviewer wrote that her portrayal of Lady Macbeth put him in mind of an exasperated society hostess burdened with unmannerly guests who had lost the new tennis balls, left the bathrooms in a mess, and finished the gin.
Victoria Clayton
#65. I did a play once where a reviewer said, 'Martin Freeman's too nice to play a bad guy.' And I thought: 'Well, bad guys aren't always bad guys, you know?' When I see someone play the obvious villain, I know it's false.
Martin Freeman
#66. Over the years, during television interviews, whenever the host or the reviewer or whoever gets cynical and nasty with me, I will behave accordingly. I will defend myself.
John Lydon
#67. A book reviewer is usually a barker before the door of a publisher's circus.
Austin O'Malley
#68. I am a bad reporter because everything seems to me worth reporting; and a bad reviewer because every sentence in every book suggests a separate essay.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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