Jonathan Dee Quotes

We never stop to consider that our beliefs are only a relative truth that's always going to be distorted by all the knowledge we have stored in our memory.

If I've vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.

Naturally, the reader has access only to the events I show and the way I show them, but as has been said, there's generally a good deal of ambiguity in that presentation.

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It's not my business whether people like or dislike it.

An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion in some sense or other

I think other people's interpretations of what I've written are a lot better than what I have, because I don't understand a lot of what I write.

Why does a writer labor over nuance and context if it won't be respected, if a critic insists on ignoring the writing at hand in favor of a more convenient analysis of his or her own particular pet peeves and straw men?

You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.

What you see is evidence of what you believe.

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well.

We hew and saw and plane facts to make them dovetail with our prejudices, so that they become mere ornaments with which to parade our objectivity.

I don't want to hear at all what the artist thinks about his art. And I'm not writing for the artist. I'm writing for the reader, and I want to tell the reader what I think.

The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.

Men who have excessive faith in their theories ... make poor observations, because they choose among the results of their experiments only what suits their object, neglecting whatever is unrelated to it and carefully setting aside everything which might tend toward the idea they wish to combat

It is in the nature of human beings to bend information in the direction of desired conclusions.

He who thinks with difficulty believes with alacrity.

What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.

People had an illogical, self-serving rationale when it came to interpreting the behavior of others.

They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.

People hear what they want and expect to hear, not what is said.

We like to continue to believe what we have been accustomed to accept as true, and the resentment aroused when doubt is cast upon any of our assumptions leads us to seek every manner of excuse for clinging to them. The result is that most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created

We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think in fact they do so.

If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.