Jennifer Weiner Quotes

In my case, once you sell a lot of books and you are labeled a bestselling author, the serious critics are never gonna say anything nice about you.

I think the 'New York Times' reviews overall tend to overlook popular fiction, whether you're a man, woman, white, black, purple or pink. I think there are a lot of readers who would like to see reviews that belong in the range of commercial fiction rather than making the blanket assumption that all commercial fiction is unworthy.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Good books get praised, bad books get praised. Good books get ignored, bad books get ignored

I thought The Shining was just absolutely wonderful. Stephen King reaches all kinds of people. In the beginning he was just dismissed out of hand, which was terrible.

Honestly, it's terrible, but I don't know if I've ever really read a Stephen King novel.

I have no objection to well-written romance, but I'd read enough of it to know that that's not what I had written. I also knew that if it was sold as romance I'd never be reviewed by the 'New York Times' or any other literarily respectable newspaper - which is basically true, although the 'Washington Post' did get round to me eventually.

I think the 'New York Times' reviews overall tend to overlook popular fiction, whether you're a man, woman, white, black, purple or pink. I think there are a lot of readers who would like to see reviews that belong in the range of commercial fiction.

Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.

When I pick up a book that's, you know, wreathed in laurels, I expect a lot, and that doesn't give the book its best chance to shine.

Some books are well-received with critics; other books sell.

Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve.

Richard Price got a million dollar advance on one fake film book based on a paragraph outline and is able to seduce gullible White reviewers who know less about ghetto life than he. The New York Times has devoted more space to Price's tourist, ghetto writing than to any Black writer in history.

If a book really wants the patronage of a great name, it is a bad book; and if it be a good book, it wants it not.

The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times.

The European and the North American consider that a book that has been awarded any kind of prize must be good; the Argentine allows for the possibility that the book might not be bad, despite the prize.

I had an idea for a medical conspiracy thriller. Since it was non-horror, I didn't want the publishers and editors bringing a lot of baggage - my history as a genre writer in the SF and horror fields, for instance - to the novel when they read it. I wanted them to consider the book solely on its own merits. So I called myself Colin Andrews. I was tired of seeing my books at floor level. Not that Herman Wouk and Phyllis Whitney and William Wharton are bad company, but I wanted to be up at eye level for a change, where people with bad backs could get a chance to see my books.

It is remarkable, but on the whole, perhaps, not to be lamented, that the world is so unkind to a new book. Any distinguished traveler who comes to our shores is likely to get more dinners and speeches of welcome than he can well dispose of, but the best books, if noticed at all, meet with coldness and suspicion, or, what is worse, gratuitous, off-hand criticism.

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

No one likes my books except the public.

It is a pity, in my opinion, that no prize exists for the writer who best refrains from adding to the world's bad books.

Peter Schweizer's book, Clinton Cash, is not discredited. It has been quoted on the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post.

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.

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

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.