A book reviewer is usually a barker before the door of a publisher's circus.
Quotes about reviewer (16 Quotes)
Critics are like horse-flies which hinder the horses in their ploughing of the soil. The muscles of the horse are as taut as fiddle-strings, and suddenly a horse-fly alights on its croup, buzzing and stinging. The horse's skin quivers, it waves its tail. What is the fly buzzing about It probably doesn't know itself. It simply has a restless nature and wants to make itself felt 'I'm alive, too, you know' it seems to say. 'Look, I know how to buzz, there's nothing I can't buzz about' 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.
This is like a skeptical sports reviewer focusing on Michael Jordan's few air balls and fouls, and drawing the conclusion that Jordan can't play basketball.
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.
What I expect of a movie reviewer is that he should love cinema as much as I do.
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.
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.
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.
Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.
If we're going to keep ourselves interested, we can't play for the reviewer and we can't just play for the audience. In the end, you have to just play for yourself.
Before she married my father, my mother was a film reviewer for The Akron Beacon Journal - a small newspaper.
The reviewer is a singularly detested enemy because he is, unlike the hapless artist, invulnerable.
One of my concerns is that writers will begin to feel the censor on their backs, and we won't get their very best. Instead their fear, or the fear imposed by the publisher, will limit them. When I lock myself up to write, I cannot allow myself to think about the censor, or the reviewer, or anyone but my characters and their story.
Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why . . .
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?
Actors yearn for the perfect director, athletes for the perfect coach, priests for the perfect pope, presidents for the perfect historian. Writers hunger for the perfect reviewer.