“If I stop to think about fans, or bestselling, or not bestselling, or good reviews, or not-good reviews, it just becomes too much. It's like staring at the mirror all day.”

“What do you read?I read what friends tell me is good. This explains the book's success, partially. It got very good reviews. Good reviews will get you a readership right away, but that's it. The review or the article appears one day in a magazine or a newspaper, then it's gone. Word of mouth is a continuing phenomenon, much more powerful.”

“Writers are funny about reviews: when they get a good one they ignore it-- but when they get a bad review they never forget it. Every writer I know is the same way: you get a hundred good reviews, and one bad, andyou remember only the bad. For years, you go on and fantasize about the reviewer who didn't like your book; you imagine him as a jerk, a wife-beater, a real ogre. And, in the meantime, the reviewer has forgotten all about the whole thing. But, twenty years later, the writer still remembers that one bad review.”

“Bestseller doesn’t necessarily mean good writer. I think it takes 10,000 book sales to make the bestseller’s list, and at about 9 dollars a pop for my book, if I had an extra $90,000 dollars of disposable income, I’d be a bestseller tomorrow. But would I be a better writer? No, I’d be a poorer writer—about $75,000 dollars poorer.”

“I don’t think we [Black Sabbath] ever got a good review for anything we did. Which is why I never bother with reviews.”

“There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”