I'm used to that. It often seems to me that's all detective work is — wiping out your false starts and beginning again. - Agatha Christie

You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories.

Once I went professionally to an archaeological expedition--and I learnt something there. In the course of an excavation, when something comes up out of the ground, everything is cleared away very carefully all around it. You take away the loose earth, and you scrape here and there with a knife until finally your object is there, all alone, ready to be drawn and photographed with no extraneous matter confusing it. That is what I have been seeking to do--clear away the extraneous matter so that we can see the truth--the naked shining truth.

Unpleasant to feel that people were discussing you