I did think reviewers were supposed to be polite about story collections - collections are rather delicate creatures in the literary environment - but not everybody got this memo, I guess.
What I expect of a movie reviewer is that he should love cinema as much as I do.
I don't read the reviews because they're too horrible and the reviewers have not been big supporters of mine over the years, probably because I make these big populist movies and they hate it.
Almost any show that has reviewers behind it, Rotten Tomatoes behind it, will find a way to survive.
And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages- all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person. '
You read reviews by top reviewers of films that not only had remarkably interesting scores, but films whose effectiveness was absolutely enhanced, and frequently created by the music, yet the reviewers seem unaware that their emotions and their nervous reactions to the films have been affected by the scoring. This is a serious flaw. Any film reviewer owes it to himself, and the public, to take every element of the film into account
Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.
The critics and the reviewers are more frightening than anything else!
We don't really need reviewers, just first-night reporters who will tell us faithfully whether or not the audience liked the show.
It never stops me from saying what I want to say about Ethiopia, the fact that a tour company is paid for me to go there. Book reviewers don't pay for the books they review.
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.
You know reviewers, they are the wind in their own sails.
I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.
It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.
You really can't write well if you're thinking about what the reviewers might say.
The reviewer is a singularly detested enemy because he is, unlike the hapless artist, invulnerable.
The preface is the most important part of a book. Even reviewers read a preface.
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.
Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.
Religion embarrasses the commentators. It is offbounds. An editor of the old Life magazine once assigned me a book on religion with remark that I was the only 'religious nut' - his term for a believer - in his stable of regular reviewers.
