Book Reviewing Quotes

Every book that doesn't first have to get past a gatekeeper or two, or 10, before being put in front of the public will be worse.

Nowadays, I only review books I really like. It's cowardly, I know, but I figure it's not my job to make people unhappy. I'll leave that to the professionals.

Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.

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.

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.

What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.

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

Book reviewing dates only to the eighteenth century, when, for the first time, there were so many books being printed that magazines - they were new, too - started printing essays about them.

An intelligent man or woman willing to make a career of reviewing fiction is hard to come by ... And the temporaries do the work cheaply. Moreover, continuity may be got at the expense of intellectual arthritis; a reviewer who has been at his grisly task for half a lifetime may stiffen into prejudices of every sort, and become too anchylosed to do better than turn his back to a new wave when it rushes down on him.

I don't want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.

A week or so ago I did a two hour book review in Baltimore Maryland.

No publisher should ever express an opinion of the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide.

I have argued about the future of fiction with jaded novelists, far-seeing postmodernists, technologists, television critics. The argument that future generations will not know the pleasures of the novel has been a staple of book reviewing since at least 1960.

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.

I am a book reviewer. I write for a glossy magazine called 'SCI FI.' The money is not life-changing, but it's a low-stress gig. Publishers send me their books. More than I could possibly read. I pick a few and write about them, put a very few others on the shelf, to be perused at my leisure, someday.

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.

I wouldn't call myself a 'literary critic,' just a book reviewer.

I'm never a fan of the sociopathic kind of reviewing, people who are sort of self-immolating and have social problems or whatever, and let it out in literary-criticism form. I just feel like book reviewing should be respectful and calm and not filled with bile.

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.

Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, blacks review blacks, etc.

Publishing can be a cliquish and incestuous business; it is not uncommon for writers from the same agencies and publishers to review each other.

There are several occupational hazards for book reviewers, chief among them being the Curse of the Jaded Palate - that sinking feeling when you start reading a new book and begin to suspect that you've seen it all before.

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.