Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Sheckley

The line reads like a casual confession, but it’s really a quiet manifesto about how imaginative work gets made. Sheckley isn’t bragging about being “well-read”; he’s describing a habit of intellectual trespassing. “Forever” signals compulsion, not virtue. “Outside of the field as well as in it” rejects the idea that expertise is a fenced-in yard. For a science fiction writer whose best stories often hinge on a single sideways premise, that’s the whole engine: novelty comes from collisions, not from staying loyal to the genre’s internal canon.

The subtext is a dig at professionalization. Fields like to police their borders, to reward people who speak the in-house dialect and cite the approved names. Sheckley frames himself as someone who refused that narrowing. Reading “in it” keeps you fluent; reading “outside” keeps you dangerous. It’s also a practical description of how satire and speculative fiction sharpen their teeth: you can’t lampoon technocratic optimism, consumer culture, or bureaucratic logic unless you understand the languages those systems use - economics, psychology, advertising, philosophy, pop culture - and can recombine them into something that feels uncomfortably plausible.

Context matters here: mid-century sci-fi was both a pulp marketplace and a laboratory for ideas, increasingly entangled with Cold War science and mass media. Sheckley’s best work thrives on the sense that the future is assembled from today’s stray parts. His reading diet wasn’t eclecticism for its own sake; it was research for surprise.