Naomi Alderman Quotes

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.

I'm not one of those writers who insist they don't read reviews and don't care much about them. I do read them, and I do care about them, and they're not always what you want them to be in an ideal world.

I never read articles about my books.

I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously.

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.

The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.

It's a novel experience to have one of my books read by a reading group.

I had read Harold Bloom's 'Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?' Late in his life, having read everything, Bloom asked which books had given him wisdom. I had just read a bunch of contemporary novels that had no wisdom for me.

I sometimes think there is nothing really to be said about a novel but 'read the book.' I have a jaundiced view of literary critics.

So many book sections in newspapers and magazines used to be lively and vibrant places. Now they are gone. You just don't see many reviews anymore. I can't control that, so I don't worry about it. I just try to do what I do and write books that people find every entertaining. I don't worry about the critics.

I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

A reviewer's lot is not always an easy one. I can remember flogging myself to finish Harold Brodkey's 'The Runaway Soul' despite the novel's consummate, unmitigated tedium.

Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.

Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.

'The Crimson Petal and the White' is a book, and it will win or lose the trust of each reader when they begin reading its pages. That relationship will go on.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Reading isn't about managing expectations. In certain ways, writing is. You're trying to send signals early in a book about what might be coming later, but I think worrying about the kind of chatter around a book is something I try and stay as far away from when I'm reading.

When I read 'Absalom, Absalom!,' I remember being really excited about it and telling all my friends they had to read it, especially my writer friends.

I've never managed to get very far with Henry James.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

'Pitchfork' said something like, 'Michael Imperioli wrote a book that sounds like Lou Reed fan fiction,' which maybe it is. It's fiction, and I'm a fan. But it's not about me, and it's not a Lou Reed book.

Few Amazon punters will explore a book with the depth of an 800-word review.

When a newspaper columnist wants to write about a novel, the rule is that you're supposed to have a 'hook,' an excuse, a timely reason to bring up the book in question.