Plainly Jonah, like me, cleaves to the “iceberg” theory of authorship: i.e.
that the author should only tell a tenth of what he knows.
A surprising number of books are written on the converse principle, the
author telling ten times more than he actually knows…
“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to
write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”—Johnson.