Quotes About Feedback

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

I never hand in a book until it's completed. Richard Jackson then reads it and asks me to clarify murky points. We work very well together. He knows how hard to push, and I know how hard to push back. He's the only person who can criticize my work without me throwing a hissy fit.

As a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response.

No one reads my books until they're finished because I don't want feedback. It confuses me, and it changes things; if I get too much feedback, I get thrown off my path.

I stay off the Internet, because I'm very sensitive to commentary. There could be 10 comments of 'Fabulous job!' and one 'She's horrible!' and it completely throws me.

Listen, you make a big movie, you're going into the Coliseum, and people are going to give you the thumbs up or the thumbs down. And that's part of the game. It's part of the fun as well.

If you've got a shot at having some 30 million people give you thumbs up or thumbs down every week, you take it.

There's an axiom I live by: 'There is no art without politics.' You either choose to engage it, or you choose political apathy. This ties in with ideas around real-time performance and feedback.

Pretend you are a customer of your own company

standing in customers' shoes and seeing the world from their perspective is better than just relying on their feedback or reaction.

You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you've got it built, they'll want something new. —Steve Jobs

When we're on the "me" plan, what others say about us has great power. A friend tells us we look good—our mind soars. A colleague tells us we're not pulling our weight at work—our mind sinks.

Don't pay any attention to the critics - don't even ignore them.

Abuse is often of service. There is nothing so dangerous to an author as silence. His name, like a shuttlecock, must be beat backward and forward, or it falls to the ground.

An old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils: Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Don't solicit feedback on your product, idea or your business just for validation purposes. You want to tell the people who can help move your idea forward, but if you're just looking to your friend, co-worker, husband or wife for validation, be careful. It can stop a lot of multimillion-dollar ideas in their tracks in the beginning.

On Twitter, people who had read my book followed me and I could see what else they were reading, why they'd liked what I'd written and by the by, more about them than I'd ever elicit from two minutes in a tent at a book festival, stuck behind a signing desk.

Having instant feedback on twitter to research material I'm considering is an enormous help.

Learning research tells us that the time lag from experiment to feedback is critical.

You have to be careful when you're getting feedback because people will give you conflicting feedback all the time, but ultimately you end up following your own inner guide.

I also believe on a practical level, if you're taking time away from people, besides entertaining them, I think it's important that there's something to react to.

Often I'll try things that just won't happen the way I'd like them to, so hearing that they're not working saves me some wear and tear the next time around.

The idea of hearing, 'Great gig, man,' one more time just turns my stomach over.

One of the advantages of the book's having been out there for more than a quarter century is that there's been time for people to report back on what it's done for them.