“I’ve always believed in the Nero Wolfe theory of knowledge. You can just sit quietly in your room – according to Pascal, the activity that if practiced more assiduously would free humanity from most of its troubles, but that was before e-mail – and through sheer mental effort force the tiniest snippets of information to yield the entire story of which they are a fragment, because the whole truth is contained in every particle of it, the way every human cell contains our DNA.”
