IRE Transactions on Information Theory (1956), volume 2, issue 1, page 3. * The Bandwagon
Shannon
Claude E.
2
1
1956
March
10.1109/TIT.1956.1056774.
As quoted in The New York Times (2 July 1978)
“A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.”
Source: Works of Samuel Johnson
“The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.”
Occasionally attributed to Walters; actually coined by Stan Barstow.
Misattributed
“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Source: Wilhelm Wundt in History: The Making of a Scientific Psychology, 1980, p. 106
“4) It is a sin to waste the reader's time.”
Niven's Laws, Niven's Laws For Writers
Burden of Dreams (1982)
Context: Taking a close look at what is around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel. And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it, I love it very much, but I love it against my better judgment.
