A Quote by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

There's an enormous difference between being a critic and a reviewer. The reviewer reacts to the experience of that book.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

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Being Between Book Critic Difference Enormous Experience Reviewer

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Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
American - Novelist

How much of a book review is about the reviewer? Sometimes it's mostly about the reviewer!

Kathryn Harrison

I wouldn't call myself a 'literary critic,' just a book reviewer.

Neel Mukherjee

The nightmare reviewer is the reviewer who has some sort of agenda that precludes him or her responding sincerely to the book. Often, that agenda is seeming clever and/or taking someone who has received more than her fair share of attention down a notch.

Curtis Sittenfeld

I don’t believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well.

James Dickey

A book reviewer is usually a barker before the door of a publisher's circus.

Austin O'Malley

Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a 'real' experience. In either case, it reacts automatically to information which you give to it from your forebrain. Your nervous system reacts appropriately to what you THINK or IMAGINE to be 'true.

Maxwell Maltz

I don't think of myself as a critic at all. I'm a reviewer and essayist. I mainly hope to share with others my pleasure in the books and authors I write about, though sometimes I do need to cavil and point out shortcomings.

Michael Dirda

I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been dismayed by a critic's bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked or thanked a reviewer for a review.

Vladimir Nabokov

Writers are funny about reviews: when they get a good one they ignore it-- but when they get a bad review they never forget it. Every writer I know is the same way: you get a hundred good reviews, and one bad, andyou remember only the bad. For years, you go on and fantasize about the reviewer who didn't like your book; you imagine him as a jerk, a wife-beater, a real ogre. And, in the meantime, the reviewer has forgotten all about the whole thing. But, twenty years later, the writer still remembers that one bad review.

Art Buchwald

Most books reviews aren't very well-written. They tend to be more about the reviewer than the book.

Tibor Fischer

It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.

Edward Abbey

So, you see, it's a real chore for me to write a book review because it's like a contest. It's like I'm writing that book review for every bad book reviewer I've ever known and it's a way of saying [thrusts a middle finger into the air] this is how you ought to do it. I like to rub their noses in it.

John Irving

Note that the #1 Top Reviewer at Amazon (4550 book reviews) is Harriet Klausner, formerly an acquisitions librarian in Pennsylvania. This just goes to show that librarians were destined to rule the Web.

Peter Morville

One reviewer dubbed my first book, 'Getting Rid of Matthew,' 'chick noir,' and another called it 'anti chick lit,' both of which I loved.

Jane Fallon

The plot is so tired that even this reviewer, who in infancy was let drop by a nurse with the result that she has ever since been mystified by amateur coin tricks, was able to guess the identity of the murderer from the middle of the book.

Dorothy Parker

I sometimes get tired because I can seldom read a book for pleasure. I'm like the play reviewer who happens to go to a play on an off day and can't help but view it critically.

Robert Cormier

A Quote by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

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