“She read a little of it. I give her review verbatim: "Oh, your book? It's all about those how-wid Wajahs. I didn't understand it."”

— Rudyard Kipling, book Plain Tales from the Hills

Wressley of the Foreign Office.
Plain Tales from the Hills (1888)

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Rudyard Kipling200

English short-story writer, poet, and novelist 1865–1936

Alex Flinn book Beastly

Source: Beastly

“I realized then that I didn't understand anything. I read all the books I could.”

Marjane Satrapi (1969) Artist

Source: Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

“My books must be an absolute nightmare to translate. I wouldn't do it. I had a couple of them in Japanese some years ago and my wife met a Japanese woman who said that she had read the books. And she asked her what the translations were like. This woman said they were the worst translation she had ever read in her life. She said she didn't recognise the books when she finally read them in English.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville: Using words to paint pictures of "magical" Prague (2006)

“I would like to review your book myself,’ said the editor of one of our principal newspapers about Worshipping False Gods. ‘But if I praise it, they will be after me also. I too will be called communal, high-caste and all that.’ ‘Brilliant, Arun, it was fascinating,’ said a leading commentator who had written a review that inclined to the positive. ‘But, you’ll understand, I couldn’t say all that in print. But it really is brilliant. How do you manage to put in this much work?’ The very selection of reviewers tells the same story. If there is a book by a leftist, editors will be loath to give it to a person of a different point of view: ‘They will say, I have deliberately given it to a rightist,’ the editors are liable to explain. On the other hand, if it is a book by a person they have decided is a rightist, they will be loath to give it to a reviewer who also has been branded a rightist: ‘They will denounce me for deliberately giving the book to a person who is bound to praise it,’ they will bleat. Therefore, in such cases they deliberately give the book to a person who ‘is bound to condemn it’!”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

“I want to talk to her. I want to have lunch with her. I want her to give me a book she just read and loved. She is my phantom limb, and I just can’t believe I’m here without her.”- on losing her best friend”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

Source: I Feel Bad about My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

“[On book reviewing] I will only turn down a book if I know I won't be able to muster enough interest to read the bloody thing. Or if I realize that I despise the author, and that I'm just going to become hysterical in my dispraise. A couple of times in my life I've disobeyed my own rule, and later regretted it. […] It's a delicate business. All too often, if one writes a favorable notice, it's seen as a product of the old-boy network, and if one dispraises a book, it's seen as envy. Nobody seems able to accept that I review books as a book reviewer, not as a competing novelist. When I review, I'm being as honest as I can. And I'm saying to the reading public — the minuscule segment of the reading public that reads reviews — that this is my judgment.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200 (2009)

“I've read The Satanic Verses and I thought it a nasty, sneering, free-thinking book… I can understand why the book is offensive and it didn't seem to me to be anything but offensive when I read it.”

Maurice Cowling (1926–2005) historian

Interviewed in Naim Attallah, Singular Encounters (Quartet Books, 1990), p. 142.

“He did his best to interest the girl in himself—that is to say, his work—and she, after the manner of women, did her best to appear interested in, what behind his back, she called "Mr. Wressley's Wajahs"; for she lisped very prettily. She did not understand one little thing about them, but she acted as if she did. Men have married on that sort of error before now.”

Rudyard Kipling book Plain Tales from the Hills

Wressley of the Foreign Office.
Plain Tales from the Hills (1888)

“When she wakes up in the morning
She writes down all her dreams
Reads like the Book of Revelations
Or the Beano or the unabridged Ulysses
Oh, I really wanna know
So tell me, Where does all the money go?
Where does all the money go?
Straight, straight up her nose”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

"What a Waster"(with Carl Barat)
Lyrics and poetry

“She read a little of it. I give her review verbatim: "Oh, your book? It's all about those how-wid Wajahs. I didn't understand it."”

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