John Bates Clark Quotes

I love it when people want to interpret my books.

The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.

I personally read criticism - at least by writers I enjoy - to stimulate a conversation in my own mind, and I like to think that's the function I serve for others.

I've learned that I have to be happy with creating discussion and debate and that I shouldn't be trying to write a book that appeals to the consensus.

I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.

I like disagreement because it forces both sides to question their own opinions and why they feel that way.

If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.

It is not only by the questions we have answered that progress may be measured, but also by those we are still asking. The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find.

The only way we can fly planes and use computers is because people were curious about their world and also skeptical about the things they were told to be immutable, so they figured out other ways of doing things.

Whether or not a text really is a universe unto itself, it is safe to say that it can only ever be as rich as its most sensitive interpreter.

I have faith in an audience being able to interpret complex material.

We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty.

Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.

Increasingly constructive doubt is the sign of advancing civilization.

I tend to be very skeptical and judgmental. I'm not really a conspiracy theorist, but I'm more likely to believe the people that speak about a conspiracy, or are convinced of conspiracies in the government, than the people who have 100 percent faith in the people who are running America.

a good reader makes a good book

I guess if you want to know one single thing I'm about, it's that I'm against easy answers.

I appear as a skeptic, who believes that doubt is the great engine, the great fuel of all inquiry, all discovery and all innovation.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

Faith can move mountains; true: mountains of stupidity.

If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you.

By the time any view becomes a majority view, it is no longer the best view: somebody will already have advanced beyond the point which the majority have reached.

In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself.

In a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question everything and to give a fair hearing to everything?

As soon as an idea is accepted it is time to reject it.