#review

Obama has built his public image around his ability to bridge divisions - racial, ideological or generational. And that was his reputation, even at Harvard Law School, where he was the first black president of the 'Law Review.' ↗

— Mara Liasson

#around #black #bridge #built #divisions

I never read reviews. I'm not interested. But I value a lot the reactions of the spectators. ↗

— Hayao Miyazaki

#interested #lot #never #not interested #reactions

I find that there are few reviews that extol women as wonderful artists. ↗

— Estelle Parsons

#extol #few #find #i #reviews

I think the 'New York Times' reviews overall tend to overlook popular fiction, whether you're a man, woman, white, black, purple or pink. I think there are a lot of readers who would like to see reviews that belong in the range of commercial fiction. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#black #commercial #fiction #i #i think

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

— Manuel Puig

#book #erred #helped #interpretations #me

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

The endorsements on books aren’t entirely impartial. Unbeknownst to the average reader, blurbs are more often than not from the writer’s best friends, colleagues or teachers, or from authors who share the same editor, publisher or agent. They represent a tangled mass of friendships, rivalries, favors traded and debts repaid, not always in good faith. ↗

— Rachel Donadio

#endorsements #publishing #reviews #faith

An oxymoronic combination of the tough and tender, [Of Mice and Men] will appeal to sentimental cynics, cynical sentimentalists...Readers less easily thrown off their trolley will still prefer Hans Andersen. [Time 1937] ↗

— Time-Life-Books

#men

At a conservative estimate, one million dollars will be spent by American readers for this book [For Whom the Bell Tolls]. They will get for their money 34 pages of permanent value. These 34 pages tell of a massacre happening in a little Spanish town in the early days of the Civil War...Mr. Hemingway: please publish the massacre scene separately, and then forget For Whom the Bell Tolls; please leave stories of the Spanish Civil War to Malraux... ↗

— Commonweal

#money

[American Psycho] is ”throughout numbingly boring, and for much of the time deeply and extremely disgusting. Not interesting-disgusting, but disgusting-disgusting: sickening, cheaply sensationalist, pointless except as a way of earning its author some money and notoriety. ↗

— Andrew Motion

#money