“A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.”

The Figure a Poem Makes (1939)

The Figure a Poem Makes (1939)
Variant: The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.
Source: Collected Poems of Robert Frost

Source: Lectures on Literature (1980)

Source: Flaubert's Parrot

Penguins and Golden Calves (2003)
Context: I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.

Source: My Side of the Mountain

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.

Source: The Paths of the Dead

Variant: Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.