Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.
| NUMBER: | 2076 |
| AUTHOR: | Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) |
| QUOTATION: | If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. |
| ATTRIBUTION: | A discussion of this concept is in William Ralph Bennett, Scientific and Engineering Problem-solving with the Computer, chapter 4, p. 105 (1976). A similar quotation was attributed, apparently incorrectly, to [Thomas Henry?] Huxley by Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, p. 4 (1931). |
| SUBJECTS: | Writers and writing |