#reviews

[On Brave New World] “Mr. Huxley has been born too late. Seventy years ago, the great powers of his mind would have been anchored to some mighty certitude, or to some equally mighty scientific denial of a certitude. Today he searches heaven and earth for a Commandment, but searches in vain: and the lack of it reduces him, metaphorically speaking, to a man standing beside a midden, shuddering and holding his nose. ↗

— L.A.G. Strong

#equality

Lolita... is undeniably news in the world of books. Unfortunately, it is bad news. There are two equally serious reasons why it isn't worth any adult reader’s attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive. ↗

— Orville Prescott

#equality

Love was like the waves in the sea, gentle and good sometimes, rough and terrible at others, but that it was endless and stronger than the sky and earth and everything in between. ↗

— Veronica Rossi

#love #love

The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel, it represented a diptych about the aftermath of Irish independence. I simply hadn't known that – and I loved the grandeur of the word "diptych". I went around quite snooty for a few days, thinking: "I wrote a diptych." [Colm Tóibín, Novelist – Portrait of the Artist, The Guardian, 19 February 2013] ↗

— Colm Tóibín

#conceit #critique #diptychs #grandeur #novelists

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. ↗

— Dorothy Parker

#bad-reviews #book #humorist #wit #bad

We set up a beta site, a test site, with movie, music and book reviews. If you're reading them and you want to buy a book or a ticket for a movie that's reviewed on the site, you can do that without leaving our site. ↗

— Jay Chiat

#book #buy #leaving #movie #music

But I honestly don't read critics. My dad reads absolutely everything ever written about me. He calls me up to read ecstatic reviews, but I always insist that I can't hear them. If you give value to the good reviews, you have to give value to the criticism. ↗

— Fiona Apple

#absolutely #always #calls #criticism #critics

I made a Christmas album a couple of years ago and just put it out on my Web site. It kind of smacked of this flavor. All of the reviews said it was Western swing even when it was Christmas standards. ↗

— Suzy Bogguss

#album #christmas #christmas album #couple #even

I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on. ↗

— Ken Burns

#cover #day #even #every #every single day

There's no artist in this world that doesn't enjoy the dream that if they have bad reviews now, the story of Keats can redeem them, in their fantasy or imagination, in the future. I think Keats' poem 'Endymion' is a really difficult poem, and I'm not surprised that a lot of people pulled it apart in a way. ↗

— Jane Campion

#artist #bad #difficult #dream #enjoy