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Reviewer: 'One of your themes was very similar to one of Beethoven's!' Brahms replied, 'Of course it is. Everyone steals - the important thing is to do it brilliantly. -- Johannes Brahms
Note that the #1 Top Reviewer at Amazon (4550 book reviews) is Harriet Klausner, formerly an acquisitions librarian in Pennsylvania. This just goes to show that librarians were destined to rule the Web. -- Peter Morville
The truth is, my folk-lore friends and my Saturday Reviewer differ with me on the important problem of the origin of folk-tales. They think that a tale probably originated where it was found. -- Joseph Jacobs
I wouldn't call myself a 'literary critic,' just a book reviewer. -- Neel Mukherjee
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How much of a book review is about the reviewer? Sometimes it's mostly about the reviewer! -- Kathryn Harrison
Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard. -- John Steinbeck
Most books reviews aren't very well-written. They tend to be more about the reviewer than the book. -- Tibor Fischer
What I expect of a movie reviewer is that he should love cinema as much as I do. -- Patrice Leconte
Before she married my father, my mother was a film reviewer for The Akron Beacon Journal - a small newspaper. -- Jim Jarmusch
I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them. -- John Banville
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. -- John Green
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. -- Toni Morrison
Over the years, during television interviews, whenever the host or the reviewer or whoever gets cynical and nasty with me, I will behave accordingly. I will defend myself. -- John Lydon
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. -- Kurt Vonnegut
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? -- Jessica Walter
I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending. -- Jamaica Kincaid
I will say overwhelmingly what means so much more to me than the opinion of one reviewer are the letters I get from fans who tell me how a particular book has changed their life. -- Jodi Picoult
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. -- Jackson Pollock
Over the years, more than one reviewer has described my fantasy series, 'A Song of Ice and Fire', as historical fiction about history that never happened, flavoured with a dash of sorcery and spiced with dragons. I take that as a compliment. -- George R. R. Martin
I did a play once where a reviewer said, 'Martin Freeman's too nice to play a bad guy.' And I thought: 'Well, bad guys aren't always bad guys, you know?' When I see someone play the obvious villain, I know it's false. -- Martin Freeman
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. -- Ted Allen
Any debut novel is usually a case of spitting into the wind - or, just maybe, casting your bread upon the waters. Without an established audience in place, first-time authors have to hope for resonant word of mouth and a receptive reviewer or three. -- Paul Di Filippo
There was one reviewer from the 'New York Times,' I forget his name, who said I was 'death warmed over.' I wrote him back that I knew more about death than he did. The 'Times' fired him, put him in the cooking department! -- James Rosenquist
The power of the print reviewer is one of those urban myths. There have always been shows that slipped under the critical radar to become popular successes: 'Tobacco Road', 'Abie's Irish Rose' and our old friend 'Spider-Man', which got the worst reviews in theatre history and is still apparently going strong. -- Ben Brantley
I have earned wages as a waitress, a nanny, a librarian, a personnel officer, an agricultural laborer, an advertising secretary, a typesetter, a proofreader, a mental-health-care provider, a substitute teacher, and a book reviewer. In and around the edges of all those jobs I have written poems, stories, and books, books, books. -- Karen Hesse
If a reviewer is beating me up, I just say, 'Oh well, my writing is not to his or her taste.' And that's as far as it goes. Because I will simultaneously read a review where somebody says, 'Oh my God, I had so much fun reading this book and I learned so much.' -- Dan Brown
What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy. -- Tom Robbins
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Is it not clear that a reviewer's psyche, like an iceberg, is seven-eighths beneath the surface? -- Delmore Schwartz
It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book. -- Edward Abbey
I don't believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well. -- James Dickey
There's an enormous difference between being a critic and a reviewer. The reviewer reacts to the experience of that book. -- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account. -- Dorothy L. Sayers
I am a bad reporter because everything seems to me worth reporting; and a bad reviewer because every sentence in every book suggests a separate essay. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
That's what people need to remember about reviewers; opinions can be all over the spectrum, and you just need to find a reviewer whose tastes match your own. -- Kevin J. Anderson
Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer. -- Richard Holt Hutton
Some reviewer might be out there saying, obviously Edge of Darkness didn't come off because of the script, blah blah blah, but everybody has read the script, except the journalist attacking it. -- William Monahan
When an older writer tries to tell a younger writer through a review what kind of career she should be pursuing, it tends to speak to the reviewer's anxieties rather than the book itself. -- Jennifer Weiner
Let's face it: Sadness and evil are always more believable than happiness and love. When a movie reviewer calls a film "realistic," everyone knows what that means--it means the movie has an unhappy ending. -- Chuck Klosterman
I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been dismayed by a critic's bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked or thanked a reviewer for a review. -- Vladimir Nabokov

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