Quotes About Reviewers

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

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.

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.

Reviewers are forever telling authors, they can't understand them. The author might often reply: Is that my fault?

To many, Courtney Love smells like rock hype. Reviewers may be excited about her, but the rock audience may be skeptical of the credentials of someone who is more famous for her interviews and her spouse than for her music.

Other reviewers hated it. Oh, they called it too dark." Too violent." Too strident and shrill and dogmatic." They would've loved Barn-Raising Club.

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

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

As it turned out, Microsoft wasn't able to get Windows 1.0 ready for shipping until the fall of 1985. Even then, it was a shoddy product. It lacked the elegance of the Macintosh interface, and it had tiled windows rather than the magical clipping of overlapping windows that Bill Atkinson had devised. Reviewers ridiculed it and consumers spurned it. Nevertheless, as is often the case with Microsoft products, persistence eventually made Windows better and then dominant.

Many are the sayings of Elia... scattered about in obscure periodicals and forgotten miscellanies. From the dust of some of these it is our intention occasionally to revive a tract or two that shall seem worthy of a better fate.... seeing that Messieurs the Quarterly Reviewers have chosen to embellish their last dry pages with fruitful quotations therefrom...

I didn't expect the book to sell in the first place. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers but at the same time I sort of hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected.

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.

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?

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.

You had to admire a guy who called his own new book a classic before it was published and anyone else had a chance to read it. Maybe he figured if he didn't do it, nobody would, or maybe he was just trying to give the reviewers a helping hand; I don't know.

Riled by pedantic reviewers in search of a solecism, Proust said that there was no correctness this side of originality.

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.

I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.

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.

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

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