Literary Bias Quotes

At about the age of seven … I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather: how lovely it was that the sun had come out. This despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria; we didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

I sense a general hostility toward Christianity among the literary and media establishments in our country. There is a tendency to keep Christian thinking out of the mainstream, to marginalize it and make it look like a product of 'fringe' groups.

The writers who reject tendentiousness and purpose in their work are the very ones who display it in every word they write. I could draw countless examples from the history of literature to show that the more a writer clamours for spiritual freedom, the more tendentious his work is liable to be.

A woman who writes commits two sins; she increases the number of books, and decreases the number of women.

The Irishman in English literature may be said to have been born with an apology in his mouth.

I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. ... But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. ... I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.

I know for a fact that - it's just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly a short story collection does not receive the same kind of attention as a novel.

Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.

If you put a pink cover on something, critics make a certain set of assumptions and may not even read the book. But my readers are happy with it.

All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust.

There is visual illiteracy with text-oriented films like bloody 'Harry Potter' and 'Lord of the Rings.'.

If you write chick lit, and if you're a New Yorker, and if your book becomes the topic of pop-culture fascination, the paper might make dismissive and ignorant mention of your book. If you write romance, forget about it. You'll be lucky if they spell your name right on the bestseller list.

I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men." "Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

That's my main complaint with Murakami: that he writes these complex males and then really static women.

Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.

Being a professor and working are not the same thing. The academic community is composed largely of nitwits. If I may generalize. People who don't know very much about what matters very much, who view life through literature rather than the other way around.

All writers are propagandists.

A female writer does definitely get more attention if she writes about male characters. It's true. It's considered somehow more literary, in the same way that it's more literary to write about supposedly male subjects, such as war. You're considered more seriously by the literary establishment.

I think people assume that women write about the domestic sphere. Women write about relationships and family. Men do, too, but then it's the Great American Novel.

I teach a lot of graduate creative writing classes, and on the first day, I like to go around the room and ask everybody what's the last book you've read that you really loved. And all of the women tend to give me chick lit titles. And to me, that's sort of disappointing because it's their only exposure to fiction somehow.

It perhaps might be said--if any one dared--that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another.

Why cannot we be delighted with an author, and even feel a predilection for him, without a dislike of others? An admiration of Catullus or Virgil, of Tibullus or Ovid, is never to be heightened by a discharge of bile on Horace.

No writer before the middle of the 19th century wrote about the working classes other than as grotesque or as pastoral decoration. Then when they were given the vote certain writers started to suck up to them.

I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention.