Book Evaluation Quotes

It is astonishing how many books I find there is no need for me to read at all.

I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.

if a book is not good enough for a grownup, it is not good enough for a child.

Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.

I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to.

The gender inequality in book reviewing isn't getting better. Male authors get the majority of review coverage, and male reviewers do most of the reviewing. It's kind of devastating.

How many books there are whose reputation is made that would not obtain it were it now to make?

I rarely read or buy a book because of a review.

I am stretching out this volume, since those German dogs estimate the value of books by their cubic contents.

I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Few books today are forgivable.

Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

[Preface to second edition:] ... I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be.

A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

Children simply don't make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed.

Books are like rocks. You hold one in your hand and look at it in various lights to get a sense of it, and then when you get a good angle, you throw it through a window to see what happens.

'The Da Vinci Code' was pretty awful. A good idea disappointingly handled.

When you find that a book is poor ... waste no more time upon it.

I have hated every Kress I read, especially this one, but the Bear is a standard Bear and if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like.

I might defend the reviewing trade, but a handful of haughty hired hands no longer having the last word on books is not a bad thing.

I skip the introduction. If the book goes in the trash, I want it to go because of my thoughts on it, not because of some Asshole's thoughts who wrote the introduction.

No publisher should ever express an opinion on the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide. I can quite understand how any ordinary critic would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply a useful middle-man. It is not for him to anticipate the verdict of criticism.

No one ever knows if a book is good until they read the book.

It doesn't really matter what "genre" your book is. What matters is that it's a good book of its kind. Whatever that kind may be.