Given cognitive vulnerabilities, it would be convenient to have an arrangement whereby reality could tell us off; and that is precisely what science is. Scientific methodology is the arrangement that allows reality to answer us back.
Merv Griffin, who developed Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, had a great line once. I used to personally answer all the mail that came in to Jeopardy! whether it was favorable or unfavorable, and Merv said, You know how I handle the nasty mail? I said no. He just grabbed it and folded it up and crunched it up and threw it in the wastebasket. He said, I don't bother with it.
At present I answer about 100 letters a month, and read 300 emails.
I would really hate it if I could call up Kafka or Hemingway or Salinger and any question I could throw at them they would have an answer. That's the magic when you read or hear something wonderful - there's no one that has all the answers.
In a sense these are questions that most people ask themselves to some extent. They become philosophical when asked with a persistence and rigour that pushes past conventional or evasive answers. It's nothing to do with acquiring a technical facility in an academic discipline.
In mathematics, if a pattern occurs, we can go on to ask, Why does it occur? What does it signify? And we can find answers to these questions. In fact, for every pattern that appears, a mathematician feels he ought to know why it appears.
If more government is the answer, then it was a really stupid question.
There is only ever one answer to the question what did you do with your life, and it's the same--fleeting and unknowable--for every one of us. I lived.
Only good questions deserve good answers.
God doesn't answer prayer, He answers desperate prayer!
The person who conveys, 'I am nothing. Make me something,' may all his life have people trying to answer his hidden plea, but their answer will be in terms of, 'I am trying to make you something because you are nothing,' and, thus, the insult will be embedded in the response. It will be heard just as clearly as the attempt to help. And it will be hated.
To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?
Just as someone who's been interested in radio and programming for so long, I can usually tell when an interviewer is doing a segment just to fill a programming slot. They ask questions, but they don't care about the answers.
The question is just as important as the answer.
The question was which spell did I make? Which did I have time to make? The answer was eerily simple. I had time to make all of them.
Some men use no other means to acquire respect than by insisting on it; and it sometimes answers their purpose, as it does a highwayman's in regard to money.
Everyone always asks me who my muse is, or who's the girl I have in mind, which is such a hard question for me to answer because I feel like it's a sensibility that varies for each individual.
Education is not the only answer and it's certainly not the immediate solution. At best, it's a necessary, but not sufficient response to widening inequality.
Cherish the questions, for the answers keep changing.
What do I want? The answer to that question does not exist.