Comment by ChainOfFools

I want to add this one line that tattooed itself on to my brain an early age, when I read a book about the screenwriting trade by William Goldman, of Princess Bride fame.

He cited it as the line that likewise instigated an irreversible tectonic shift in his own approach to the craft of writing. It was simply this: the realization that "poetry is compression."

I think this insight has stood up to the rise of technological leverage and may generalize extraordinarily well into some sort of philosophical ground truth, on the suspicion that given the mismatch between the scale of the universe and the two-odd kilogram lump of tissue in our skull, all of human knowledge is essentially an exercise in curated compression.