#evie

A savage review is much more entertaining for the reader than an admiring one; the little misanthrope in each of us relishes the rubbishing of someone else. ↗

— Arthur Smith

#each #else #entertaining #little #more

I mean people just have a way of - y'know they'll review your record in two sentences and put you in this little stupid box that you don't want to be in. ↗

— Elliott Smith

#i #just #know #little #mean

I remember very clearly at the first budget review having a pretty direct conversation with the head of manufacturing... We began to get huge improvements in productivity and responsiveness. I got a chance to see that firsthand. ↗

— Rick Wagoner

#budget #chance #clearly #conversation #direct

...because of the foulness of her mother's emotional river, a current which ran swift, changing its path without warning... ↗

— Tamara Rose Blodgett

#descriptive-prose #dystopia #from-review #paranormal-romance #post-apocalyptic

I was going to suggest some hard-won guidelines for responsible reviewing. For instance: First, as in Hippocrates, do no harm. Second, never stoop to score a point or bite an ankle. Third, always understand that in this symbiosis, you are the parasite. Fourth, look with an open heart and mind at every different kind of book with every change of emotional weather because we are reading for our lives and that could be love gone out the window or a horseman on the roof. Fifth, use theory only as a periscope or a trampoline, never a panopticon, a crib sheet or a license to kill. Sixth, let a hundred Harolds Bloom. ↗

— John Leonard

#reviews #change

I am Orafoura, but you can call me Jarod Kintz. I’m fairly proud to proclaim that Dora J. Arod has me on her short list of “World’s worst writers.” The list couldn’t get any shorter, because I’m the only name on it. I should tell her to stop calling it a list, and change the title to “World’s worst writer.” If you’re wondering why I rate all my work one star, it’s because the rating system doesn’t have a zero star option, or better yet, go into negative numbers. ↗

— Orafoura

#books #humor #list #rating #ratings

Catch-22 has much passion, comic and fervent, but it gasps for want of craft and sensibility… Its author, Joseph Heller, is like a brilliant painter who decides to throw all the ideas in his sketchbooks onto one canvas, relying on their charm and shock to compensate for the lack of design… The book is an emotional hodgepodge; no mood is sustained long enough to register for more than a chapter. ↗

— Richard G. Stern

#design

Nearly every writer writes a book with a great amount of attention and intention and hopes and dreams. And it's important to take that effort seriously and to recognize that a book may have taken ten years of a writer's life, that the writer has put heart and soul into it. And it behooves us, as book-review-editors, to treat those books with the care and attention they deserve, and to give the writer that respect." Pamela Paul, New York Times Book Review editor, in a Poets & Writer's interview (something for all reviewers to think about) ↗

— Madeline Sharples

#pamela-paul #poets-writers #dreams

Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation--who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him--but he must go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope--qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for, and are not commonly come by with much ease, either by a critic's formula or by a critic's yearning. ↗

— Bill Styron

#fiction #fiction-writing #paris-review #equality

A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts. ↗

— Bill Gaede

#peer-review #physics #science #scientific-language #experience