40 Quotes About Bad-reviews

[On The Catcher in the Rye] “This Salinger, he’s a short story guy. And he knows how to write about kids. This book though, it’s too long. Gets kind of monotonous. And he should’ve cut out a lot about these jerks and all that crumby school. They depress me. — James Stern

[On Brave New World] “Mr. Huxley has been born too late. Seventy years ago, the great powers of his mind would have been anchored to some mighty certitude, or to some equally mighty scientific denial of a certitude. Today he searches heaven and earth for a Commandment, but searches in vain: and the lack of it reduces him, metaphorically speaking, to a man standing beside a midden, shuddering and holding his nose.

An oxymoronic combination of the tough and tender, [Of Mice and Men] will appeal to sentimental cynics, cynical sentimentalists...Readers less easily thrown off their trolley will still prefer Hans Andersen.[Time 1937]

[Middlemarch] is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole.

[Leaves of Grass is] monstrous because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect; because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages the taste.

[About John Updike's Rabbit Run] The author fails to convince us that his puppets are interesting in themselves, or that their plight has implications that transcend their narrow world.

Seriously, I do not know what to say of this book [ Absalom, Absalom!] except that it seem to point to the final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent… this is a penny dreadful tricked up in fancy language and given a specious depth by the expert manipulation of a series of eccentric technical tricks. The characters have no magnitude and no meaning because they have no more reality than a mince-pie nightmare.

Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer. [1857]

[On Wuthering Heights] Here, all the faults of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë are magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read.[North British Review, 1847]