As is perhaps obvious, Morris Zapp had no great esteem for his fellow-labourers in the vineyards of literature. They seemed to him vague, fickle, irresponsible creatures, who wallowed in relativism like hippopotami in mud, with their nostrils barely protruding into the air of common-sense. They happily tolerated the existence of opinions contrary to their own – they even, for God’s sake, sometimes changed their minds. Their pathetic attempts at profundity were qualified out of existence and largely interrogative in mode. They liked to begin a paper with some formula like, ‘I want to raise some questions about so-and-so’, and seemed to think they had done their intellectual duty by merely raising them. This manoeuvre drove Morris Zapp insane. Any damn fool, he maintained, could think of questions; it was answers that separated the men from the boys. .David Lodge
About This Quote
The idea of a person asking questions and not giving answers is the opposite of what the idea of a person trying to do something and not doing it. The opposite of what one is supposed to do. This quote suggests that the only way to be a real intellectual is by being able to give an answer or an answer for an answer, so that you can stop asking questions, so you are no longer an intellectual. But if you are really intelligent, you are able to ask questions without giving answers, so you are still intelligent.
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