I did my homework, of course, by inhaling as much literature as was available to find, so that when it was time to shoot I could hopefully exhale [ Harriet Tubman ].
Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.
The ideal reasoner, he remarked, would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it.
In journalism, if there's a hole in your story you figure out a way around it because you've got a 4 p.m. deadline. It's a neat skill to have but it's deadly for literature. In literature, you need to stare at that hole, not ignore it. You need to figure it out.