I became a writer because I love to read, yet I never get to unless I'm reviewing a book or doing research.
I was reminded as I was reviewing my life, that I have been in too many conflicts, too many wars, political battles, military battles, civil strifes in government. And always one lesson stands out and that is, those whom you fight most passionately often turn out to be your best friends.
Reviewing our fight, I asked Janco, “Why do you rhyme when you fight?
I always think upon Lee Strasberg with warmth, and reviewing his wisdom is a pleasure.
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
We're reviewing everything to see how we can do it better, faster, and more efficiently.
I don't read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I'm also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.
I think people feel very comfortable reviewing the idea of me, as opposed to what I've actually written. Most of the time, when people write about one of my books, they're really just writing about what they think I may or may not represent, as sort of this abstract entity. Is that unfair? Not really. If I put myself in this position where I'm going to kind of weave elements of memoir into almost everything, well, I suppose that's going to happen.
The practice of "reviewing". . . in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism.
The more disastrous the mishaps the simpler the reviewing task.
The only thing that interests me is history - reviewing the past and making something out of it.
Once you begin reviewing judgment calls, which in basketball there are many, you put yourself on a very slippery slope in terms of what could be reviewed, and ultimately the number of reviews that could take place that would make it unwieldy.
Reviewing the day's lessons. Isn't it joyful? Friends come from far. Isn't it delightful? One has never been angry at other's misunderstanding. Isn't he a respectable man?
Reviewing what you have learned and learning anew, you are fit to be a teacher.
I keep reviewing my feelings about the supernatural.
In reviewing the history of the times through which we have passed, no portion of it gives greater satisfaction or reflection, than that which represents the efforts of the friends of religious freedom and the success with which they are crowned.
Courts are an aristocratic institution in a democracy. That's the dilemma for an institution that has the function of reviewing the will of the people. We're bound to be "anti-majoritarian. "
I'm never a fan of the sociopathic kind of reviewing, people who are sort of self-immolating and have social problems or whatever, and let it out in literary-criticism form. I just feel like book reviewing should be respectful and calm and not filled with bile.
What a pity when editors review a woman's book, that they so often fall into the error of reviewing the woman instead.
If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most of all, it ceases to be intimate. It degenerates into a monologue or a mutter. An unreviewed book is a struck bell that gives no resonance. Without reviews, literature would be oddly mute in spite of all those words on all those pages of all those books. Reviewing makes of reading a participant sport, not a spectator sport.
