Book Reviewers Quotes

“I try not to hate anybody. "Hate is a four-letter word," like the bumper sticker says. But I hate book reviewers.

Book reviewers are the most despicable, loathsome order of swine that ever rooted about the earth. They are sniveling, revolting creatures who feed their own appetites for bile by gnawing apart other people's work. They are human garbage. They all deserve to be struck down by awful diseases described in the most obscure dermatology journals.

Book reviewers live in tiny studios that stink of mothballs and rotting paper. Their breath reeks of stale coffee. From time to time they put on too-tight shirts and pants with buckles and shuffle out of their lairs to shove heaping mayonnaise-laden sandwiches into their faces, which are worn in to permanent snarls. Then they go back to their computers and with fat stubby fingers they hammer out "reviews." Periodically they are halted as they burst into porcine squeals, gleefully rejoicing in their cruelty.

Even when being "kindly," book reviewers reveal their true nature as condescending jerks. "We look forward to hearing more from the author," a book reviewer might say. The prissy tones sound like a second-grade piano teacher, offering you a piece of years-old strawberry hard candy and telling you to practice more.

But a bad book review is just disgusting.

Ask yourself: of all the jobs available to literate people, what monster chooses the job of "telling people how bad different books are"? What twisted fetishist chooses such a life?”
― Steve Hely, How I Became a Famous Novelist

“Crime isn't pretty, only fashionably dressed.”
― S.W. Frank, Amoroso

“Recommending a book to someone is the second best thing to buying it for them, which is the second best thing to reading it for them.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“It's the outgrowth of a natural human contradiction: people want to read good books, but people are also invincibly lazy ... so they read only stupid, easy books, but they still keep feeling the original want - and eventually, that causes them to call the stupid, easy books they actually do read good ... because it seems like such a neat little solution to their problem! And if those stupid, easy books are big enough financial successes or garner a wide enough audience of people trying that same solution, those of us who aren't invincibly lazy and actually do read good books - or at least real books - on a regular basis start to get characterized as cranks and killjoys and snobs, because we still have the nerve to say the Harry Potter books are awful, or that there's no literary worth to anything Stephen King has ever written, or that Susan Sontag is grotesquely overrated, or that nobody should be reading Raymond Carver .... and so on. All those judgements are right, but as the crowds grow larger wanting to elevate what they've settled for, they start to look more and more eccentric ...”
― Steve Donoghue

“Book reviewer: Very often a writer who has never been published taking out their frustrations on a writer who has.”
― Raul Ramos y Sanchez, Pancho Land

“Besides, it was all very well to criticise the works of others, but in fact it was quite hard, he discovered, to tell a story.”
― Iain Pears

“Why are all of my book reviews a five-star review? Because if the book is not a five-star book, I won't waste my time reviewing it.”
― Kelly from Kelly's Classroom Online

“Every literary critic was an avid bookworm once, drinking cocoa instead of coffee, before the superpower appeared.”
― Peter F. L. Jílek

“No, sir, it was reserved for the present day to bring forth a fry of young critic imps, the mingled spawn of arrogance and envy hatched by mischief, who were to entail disgrace for ever on the word reviewer, by making it synonymous with libeller and assassin.... You may proceed in your career… grin over the collection of hopes destroyed, of fortunes injured, of feelings outraged, of intellects deranged, of hearts broken by your merry malice, or your venomous corruption; enjoy the feast infernal!”
― Thomas Skinner Surr, A Winter in London or Sketches of Fashion; Volume II