Reader Bias Quotes

We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.

The Bible itself is a book that constantly must be wrestled with and re-interpreted. ... Bible interpretation is colored by historical context, the reader's bias and current realities. The more you study the Bible, the more questions it raises. It is not possible to simply do what the Bible says.

I always favor the hero and heroine from whichever book I've completed most recently. Yes, I'm faithless and fickle!

We're at an interesting phase of Asian and Asian-American writing, where we might succeed in having readers look at us as creative individuals who write with fury and fire about the world, and in new ways, without having them say things like "I read a really good Indian book," or "That Malaysian fellow writes very well." So I hope by identifying as Indian I can get people who don't usually read "ethnic" or "Indian" literature to read that literature and enjoy it.

I've always been curious about how much of our cultural baggage we bring to what and how we read. I suspect we bring a lot, although we like to think we don't.

When you write a book, and you argue a problem is complicated and multidimensional, it's very easy to read a slice of that book and say, 'Well, this is the part that either confirms or really challenges my biases, so that's what I'm going to say the entire book is about.'

REVIEW, v.t. To set your wisdom (holding not a doubt of it./ Although in truth there's neither bone nor skin to it)/ At work upon a book, and so read out of it/ The qualities that you have first read into it.

I can't change the preconceived notions a reader brings to a work, but I can do my best to be aware of, address, and subvert tropes and expectations that readers may have as best I can and hope I don't screw it up too much.

The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality.

The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head.

I think, though, that people will read into a reporter's story a bias that they want to see in a reporter.

If we declare ourselves, as readers, to be on the side of life, the question has to be asked what sort of life we are on the side of.

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you've already taken a step towards it.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.

I know when I go and see a writer, the first thing I think to myself is, 'Are they the character in the book?' You just can't help it; it's the way people are.

Whenever you have two characters in a book, whether it's a novel or nonfiction, you run the risk that the reader is going to like one more than the other. They're going to read one chapter and say, 'I can't wait to get back to the other guy.'

Writing history is a difficult job: in the first place because what you put down has to correspond exactly to the facts; secondly, because if you permit yourself to criticize any wrongdoing, most of your readers will think that you are malevolent, or even envious.

Some readers allow their prejudices to blind them. A good reader knows how to disregard inappropriate responses.

The writer's original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader's.

I hate to ask about the title, because it makes it seem like that is all I've read of the book.

No work of history can ever escape its own time...we are all influenced by what we read and what we experience.

A lot of science fiction is very accessible and very readable, but a lot of people are justifiably put off by the covers of spaceships - though that never put me off.

It is quite too common a practice, both in readers and the more superficial class of critics, to judge a book by what it is not, a matter much easier to determine than what it is.

I always feel it is a shortcoming of mine as a reader and as a writer that I frankly need to like somebody.