Joanna Scott Quotes

The attitude that poetry should not be analyzed is prevalent among many who consider themselves experts on children's literature. But I suspected that kids like to look closely at things and figure out what makes them go.

Of the modern critics, although I disagree with almost everything she says, I admire Mary McCarthy's eloquence and social observation in 'Sights and Spectacles'; she thinks in print, but she doesn't have a real feel for the stage.

For capitalism, war and peace are business and nothing but business.

I was an English major, so I love discussing possibilities and alternate theories.

Capitalism has forced everyone to overoptimize in order to compete.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

A classical work doesn't ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it.

It's business, selling comics, you work out what sells and you don't want to muck about with it too much.

I think that if you get too close to the character, if you do too much historical research, you may find yourself defending your view of a character against the author's view, and I think that's terribly dangerous.

Toy companies aren't interested in ideology, they want to sell toys. If they would sell a toy that both boys and girls would buy, it doubles profits.

Often, what you see in the media is driven by economic forces.

Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

Lastly, literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist.

Money trumps peace sometimes. There are a lot of very powerful commercial interests around the world.

The free market economy provides an unparalleled example of a continuing healthy circulation of elites. In this dynamic economy, failure to keep up with competitors, failure to satisfy the demands of consumers in the best possible way, will topple elites quickly and establish new ones who do the job better.

We must educate and train our children to compete and succeed in the 21st century. Our kids are not going to grow up to compete with children in Alabama or Mississippi. They're going to grow up to compete with kids in India, and China, all over the world; children who are learning to compete and succeed in the 21st century themselves.

I think it's a completely good thing to want to do business, to want to make money and be a success in the marketplace, to get the attention of customers. I'm not in the business of pointing fingers or blaming companies, but there is a limit to everything.

In a 21st-century economy, it is critical that we equip our nation's children with the tools they need to compete in a global marketplace.

There's competition everywhere.

It's not my job to tell people what a work means.

What, if not Shakespeare, is open for interpretation?

A lot of times, politics, global issues are very black and white. There is a place for that, but it's also fantastic to have art side by side, from different viewpoints, open for interpretations.

The 'Reader's Digest' used to run a feature called 'It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.' The new wisdom - post-Trump and Brexit - is that it doesn't.

There are books that are made for you to sit and puzzle over and spend time with.

Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers... that is a small population.