The best kind of praise is intelligent praise.

For heaven's sake, Wade, you sound as if it involved capes and daggers and poisons. Take out one of your dreams and dust it off and send it to Miss Harper to work on. Goodness knows you have enough of them lurking in that aweful brain of yours.

Sure, at heart I wanted to be a Dickens, but I hated being great on command.

I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

(Letter 16, 1657)

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

Maybe those sailors will write bad poems, but the same men would have kept dull diaries, too. The problem has to do not with the evidence but with the witness. The point is not the adventure but the adventurer. Reality cannot be directly rendered. Reality is a pile of bricks that can assume many forms.