Quotes About Work Reviews

“If you want to be a poet, there is no greater mistake you could make than to publish whatever work you have as soon as you can. Why? Well because your debut is the only shot you have. It should be made of dynamite. There is nothing worse - believe me - than to have an oeuvre with a mediocre debut, and likely you wont get that far at all, and you will wait for reviews that wont come, just a horrible idea really. I don't need tell this to the rare and extreme talents - they are like a force of nature - but i am talking to the rest of you. People who love their youth don't make it easy on them - making it easy for them is a way to destroy them, But the representatives of my generation have no clue,or idea about Bildung at all, which is why I am at odds with most of them.”

— Martijn Benders

“Remember, we all make our work available in a commercial transaction, the terms of which we, ourselves, dictate. If we give it away for free, that's our decision, and there is no refuge in the lame defense, "what do you want for nothing?" The buyer does not waive his right to express his opinion."
[Thick Skin and Bad Reviews, Blog post, June 26, 2013]”

— Pete Morin

“The work is at such a high level and is so well executed, it really is a matter of taste ... [Source: Project Runway - but consider, applied to the theme of book reviews, it seems apropos!]”

— Tim Gunn

“Most everything influences my work. Working in a used bookstore. Going for walks in the woods and peering at mushrooms. Writing reviews. Coming from frumpy, grumpy, faded-at-the-knees Winnipeg.”

— Ariel Gordon

“I am really very grateful for this Award. It is one of the first given to a woman, and to two women at that. When I first started getting work published, I used to have wistful thoughts at the way all important awards were given to men. Women, I used to think, could be as innovative, imaginative and productive as possible - and women were the ones mostly at work in the field of fantasy for children and young adults - but only let a man enter the field, and people instantly regarded what he had to say and what he did as more Important. He got respectful reviews as well as awards, even if what he was doing - which it often was - was imitating the women. But you have changed all that.
Thank you for being so enlightened.
Women, large-minded, formidable women, have played an almost exclusive part in helping my career. I have hardly ever dealt with a man - at least, when it came to publishing:”

— Diana Wynne Jones

“JB's friends were poets and performance artists and academics and modern dancers and philosophers
he had, Malcolm once observed, befriended everyone at their college who was least likely to make money
and their lives were grants and residencies and fellowships and awards. Success, among JB's Hood Hall assortment, wasn't defined by your box-office numbers (as it was for his agent and manager) or your costars or your reviews (as it was by his grad-school classmates): it was defined simply and only by how good your work was, and whether you were proud of it.”

— Hanya Yanagihara

“To Jacob the act of critiquing art was essentially imprecise. That's why he didn't read reviews on anything he liked, be it a book, a movie, or a record. He believed that any work an artist puts forth which contains the truth as he or she sees it is worthy of consideration, and any commentary of the work beyond that is nothing more than pure individual opinion and should not be considered relevant to the work itself.”

— Tiffanie DeBartolo

“Shorter work - personal essays and book reviews - allow me to take a break from working on a book, which is good for the book and for its author.”

— Kathryn Harrison

“All things considered, I've learned more from talking to painters than talking to writers. Not that painters are smarter than writers, such is seldom the case, but in conversation writers are inclined to waste an inordinate amount of time either bragging or bellyaching about reviews and royalties, complaining about their publishers, or dissing other authors. Painters, being equally insecure, can likewise come across as boring and bitchy
it's tough being creative in a materialistic society
but since they labor not in vineyards of verbiage but upon ice floes of visual images, they tend to function with fewer inhibitions than the wordsmiths when it comes to vocally exploring and expressing ideas. Since no one judges their speech, comparing it to their written work, they don't feel so acutely the weight of language.”

— Tom Robbins

“Book reviews have never helped me. Most of them erred in their interpretations and their work has been a waste of time.”

— Manuel Puig

“During the course of any normal day, I usually pay more attention to assembling a grocery list than I do to reading movie reviews, although there are a more than a few film critics who bring huge insight to their work.”

— Mike Barnicle

“Having your book edited is like watching your cat being operated on. It's uncomfortable and someone is probably going to get hurt. Most likely the cat. But in the end, things work out for the best and your cat is better it. And then your cat gets released in hardcover, and you have to read all of his reviews.”

— Jenny Lawson

“I think, in general, it's better not to respond to reviews of your work.”

— Nell Freudenberger

“It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or their pre-pub whatever, but I kind of doubt it. I don't think that's how the work probably got made.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“I never read reviews at all. I'm proud of the work I did.”

— Nicole Kidman

“I don't read reviews, and it's not because I don't think I can learn something, I'm sure I could learn a lot. I just that I feel very passionately about the work and especially when you're doing theater, you really only need one director and when you read reviews, you feel like you have twelve, because you respond to them, naturally.”

— Andrea Riseborough

“In our marriage it was our practice not to share anything that was upsetting, depressing, demoralizing, tedious-unless it was unavoidable. Because so much in a writer's life can be distressing-negative reviews, rejections by magazines, difficulties with editors, publishers, book designers-disappointment with one's own work, on a daily/hourly basis!-it seemed to me a very good idea to shield Ray from this side of my life as much as I could. For what is the purpose of sharing your misery with another person, except to make that person miserable, too?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

“I never read my reviews ... not even the good ones. Barbra Streisand once told me, if just one person in the audience doesn't applaud, it bothers her. I'm the same way. I'd be devastated to read that someone didn't like my work.”

— Pat Conroy

“I work really hard at these books, and when colleagues write nasty reviews of them, I take it very personally.”

— Richard Ford

“I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.”

— Tennessee Williams

“It's important to see how people see your work and how they feel about it. I know a lot of directors who are like, 'I never read reviews,' and I'm like, 'Yeah I can tell.'”

— Xavier Dolan

“The 'New York Times' reviews of my work have been evenly divided - favourable and unfavourable.”

— Zubin Mehta

“Hard to remember these days that there was a time you had to wait for the ink and paper reviews to see your work excoriated. With the invention of the internet, any subliterate cretin can be Michiko Kakutani.”

— Robert Galbraith

“There's always a crisis somewhere, and you get the satisfaction of solving the problem. And then, there's always the mystery of whether a program will work or not, and waiting for the reviews or seeing what the audience figures are.”

— Rebecca Eaton

“My books have all been very deeply felt. You don't spend eight years of your life working on a trendy knockoff. In that sense I've been serious. But I don't do lots of things that other serious writers do. I don't write book reviews. I don't sit on panels about the state of the novel. I don't go to writer conferences. I don't teach writing seminars. I don't hang out at Yaddo or MacDowell. I'm not concerned with my reputation as a writer and where I stand relative to other writers. I'm not competitive or professionally ambitious. I don't think about my work and my career in an overarching or systematic way. I don't think about myself, as I think most writers do, as progressing toward some ideal of greatness. There's no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

“In the controversy that followed the prince's remarks, his most staunch defender was professor John Taylor, a scholar whose work I had last noticed when he gave good reviews to the psychokinetic (or whatever) capacities of the Israeli conjuror and fraud Uri Geller. The heir to the throne seems to possess the ability to surround himself-perhaps by some mysterious ultramagnetic force?-with every moon-faced spoon-bender, shrub-flatterer, and water-diviner within range.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“I'd love to work on something that gets some type of critical respect. This business is sometimes so brutal - you work on something for months and really feel like the project is good and you're doing the best work you can, and then it just gets hammered by critics. It's such a bummer sometimes, because everything seems to build up to the release and a couple of bad reviews can make it seem like it was all a waste, which you know it wasn't.”

— Jeff Cardoni

“Probably writers should forget what it was like to write the last novel, and the one before that, and the one before that, or we should all be plumbers. It must be good to be a plumber. Everyone is happy to see you, and no one reviews your work.”

— Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

“If you read reviews that you think by their very nature are not respectful of the actresses involved or not appreciating the work as it should be, I think you should write to reviewers or comment and say, "Are you kidding me?"”

— Romola Garai

“Your greatest creation is your creative life. It's all in your hands. Rejection can't take it away; reviews can't take it away. The life you create for yourself as an artist, may be the only thing that's really yours. Create a life you can center yourself in calmly as you wait for your work to grow.”

— Sara Zarr

“If you read reviews of concerts, the word 'creative' comes up all the time. However, performers playing music usually aren't creative. Critics might say they are, but they're just playing another persons work. They didn't create it.”

— Ned Rorem

“With the advent of this kind of TMZ culture, it sadly seems to have infiltrated the vanguard of film commentary. I see these reviews sometimes where I think, well, you have a right to say whatever you want about my work, and I will listen whether it's good or bad and see if there's something that I might work with, but personal issues don't have a place in film commentary.”

— Nicolas Cage

“I am good in the fact that most of my reviews have been very positive really. I get pretty good reviews. There have been some that aren't - critical. I think they are extremely - the people that wrote them really don't understand what they are looking at quite frankly or have a very preconceived notion of what conceptual art should be or where I am at or the fact that I may change what I have done from what I did 20 years ago. But there is always some reason that they just sort of get it wrong. And so it certainly doesn't affect my work.”

— Robert Barry

“When a writer's whole being is poured into a piece of work, there is never enough. The feeling of finally getting to the end of a piece of work, of making it as good as you can at that moment, is more of a relief than anything else, and then you wait for reviews.”

— Dani Shapiro