Information Conveyance Quotes

The printed page conveys information and commitment, and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience, and it's very limited in what it can do logically. It's an existential experience - there and then gone.

After Pope, in the beginning of Romanticism, people developed the idea that imagination rather than reason was a special form of knowledge and its best expression is through poetry. Therefore, poetry should not try to do the stuff that mere prose does: convey information or make arguments about ideas.

Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.

I feel like math and writing are the same thing. You're putting together a lot of complex things to satisfy different requirements. It's got to be aesthetically pleasing; it's got to have subtext; it's got to convey information.

I found that it was easiest to convey the information in the context of the life of the scientist or in the context of our own personal experience, and there was no idea that was too complicated that couldn't be explained clearly and directly.

What do you think is the world's most recognisable container of information? It's the human face. We are constantly reading each other and responding.

You'd expect, as good Darwinian creatures, we would evolve to be fascinated with how the world really is, and we would use language to convey real-world information, we'd be obsessed with knowing the way things are, and we would entirely reject stories that aren't true. They're useless. But that's not the way we work.

Pictures have a lot more power than text. Text is just a bunch of little symbols. You have to actually read it and imagine it, and even that can be censored. With pictures, it's a lot more immediate.

Telegraphs are machines for conveying information over extensive lines with great rapidity.

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

One of the interesting things about the history of poetry in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is that people who read liked getting their information in rhyme just as much as in prose. The genre that we would think of as nonfiction often was written in verse in forms like the Georgic when people thought that one of the tasks of poetry was conveying arguments and information in a pleasant way.