Art & Creativity Quote by George Orwell

Orwell doesn’t just complain about reviewing; he diagnoses it as a small factory for dishonesty. The phrase “prolonged, indiscriminate” is the tell: the problem isn’t criticism as a craft, but criticism as an industrial routine, where volume and speed matter more than judgment. When reviewing becomes a conveyor belt, taste gets flattened into etiquette. You’re not evaluating books so much as laundering them into public legitimacy.

“Thankless, irritating and exhausting” lands like a list made by someone who has done the shift work. Orwell’s bite comes from how he frames the reviewer’s moral injuries. First, “praising trash”: the critic becomes a PR functionary, nudged by publishers, editors, friendships, and the soft tyranny of being “nice.” Second, “inventing reactions”: the deeper sin is manufacturing interiority on command. He’s mocking the performance of sensitivity that the literary marketplace demands, where the reviewer must pretend that every book prompts a vivid response, even when the honest reaction is indifference.

The subtext is classic Orwell: language corrupts when it’s used to conceal real feeling rather than communicate it. Review culture trains writers to produce fluent pseudo-opinions, and over time the fake voice can replace the real one. Context matters, too: Orwell wrote in a mid-century ecosystem of tight magazines, small pay, and constant copy needs. He’s defending criticism as a form of truth-telling by admitting how easily it becomes the opposite: a polite, exhausted fiction that props up the very culture it’s supposed to scrutinize.