My constant fear as a writer as that I will fail to convey the gravity of living. I know that to some degree that sets me up as boorish, but I'll have to live with that, and, honestly, I'd rather err on the side of being "unredeemingly dark," as one reviewer said about blood kin, than on keeping to the sunny side.
In the media, a reviewer has his personal vision but it's passed along to a million readers or whatever. He might think that this particular song sounds like Jo Blow. Or like a Bo Diddley record that he heard six years ago. But the artist who made the record may never have even heard the Bo Diddley song. We all respond differently.
The thing about albums is just coming up with new material. I just got tired of that syndrome of putting out an album and then some reviewer claims that this song or that song has something to do with x y or z.
Before she married my father, my mother was a film reviewer for The Akron Beacon Journal - a small newspaper.
That's what people need to remember about reviewers; opinions can be all over the spectrum, and you just need to find a reviewer whose tastes match your own.
An intelligent man or woman willing to make a career of reviewing fiction is hard to come by. . . And the temporaries do the work cheaply. Moreover, continuity may be got at the expense of intellectual arthritis; a reviewer who has been at his grisly task for half a lifetime may stiffen into prejudices of every sort, and become too anchylosed to do better than turn his back to a new wave when it rushes down on him.
I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending.
I couldn't give a sh*t what they have to say. As soon as I go home and see my husband James Thornton of Holby Blue fame and pick up my dog and cuddle him, that's all that matters. I couldn't care if some theatre reviewer thinks my American accent sounds a bit Welsh.
What I expect of a movie reviewer is that he should love cinema as much as I do.
The reviewer is a singularly detested enemy because he is, unlike the hapless artist, invulnerable.
Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.
I don’t believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well.
