Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.
Lots of people can write a good first page but to sustain it, that's my litmus test. If I flip to the middle of the book and there's a piece of dialogue that's just outstanding, or a description, then I'll flip back to the first page and start it.
A book reviewer is usually a barker before the door of a publisher's circus.
There's an enormous difference between being a critic and a reviewer. The reviewer reacts to the experience of that book.
One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.
No agent wants to see a book until he or she has decided whether to pursue the relationship.
I wouldn't overall say that "The Diagnosis" is a funny book. I would say that it has comic moments. It's a modern tragedy.
Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.
With only one novel to her credit, Anna Jarzab can't quite be classified in Werlin country, but 'All Unquiet Things' is a big step in that direction.
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.
Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error.
