Wednesday 18 November 2009

the wisdom of terry pratchett

1. Top international biblical scholars reading anything I write will be familiar with the relentless Ecclesiastes. In The Truth, Terry Pratchett's at it too (The Truth is about newspapers):
The press waited. It looked, now, like a great big beast. Soon he'd throw a lot of words into it. And in a few hours it would be hungry again, as if those words had never happened. You could feed it, but you could never fill it up
I don't think 'beast' is an accident either.

2. TP's good, but he didn't predict superinjunctions:
'Then I'll ban him from doing it!'
'How, sir?'
Vimes looked a little deflated. 'You can't tell me that as commander of police I can't stop some little ti- some idiot from writing down anything he likes?'
'Oh, no, sir. Of course you can. But I'm not sure you can stop him writing down that you stopped him writing things down'

No comments: