
“I have a simple philosophy. Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. And scratch where it itches.”
As quoted in The Best (1974), edited by Peter Passell and Leonard Ross.
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 98e
“I have a simple philosophy. Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. And scratch where it itches.”
As quoted in The Best (1974), edited by Peter Passell and Leonard Ross.
“One learns to itch where one can scratch.”
The Story of Wong Choi and the Merchant Teen King's Thumb
Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat (1928)
“Itch to read, scratch to understand.”
From the ninth book, "The Book of Secrets"
The Pillow Book
The New York Times (16 December 1969)
Source: Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (1960), p. 548
(15 June 2007)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2007
Context: Art is not science. Even when art is about science, it is still art. There cannot be consensus, in the sense that science strives for meaningful consensus. And unlike science, art is not progressive. Personally, I have my doubts that science can be said to be genuinely progressive, but I'm pretty dammed certain that art is not. Which is not to say that it is not accumulative or accretionary. But the belief that sf writers are out there forecasting the future, that they have some social responsibility to do so, that's malarky, if you ask me. Writers of sf can only, at best, make educated guesses, and usually those guesses are wrong, and clumping together to form a consensus does not in any way insure against history unfolding in one of those other, unpredicted directions. People love to pick out the occasional instances where Jules Verne and William Gibson got it right; they rarely ever point fingers at their miscalls.