The Background for Good Conversation : Page 101

But more important than traveling is the habit of exact observation, the tendency to select significant details and to mark them. Sir Walter Scott once rode a hundred miles to note exactly what kinds and how many flowers and shrubs surrounded a cave he wanted to describe in a novel. The eye for news in the journalist is the eye for the picturesque, the exceptional, the different in the conversationalist. It isn't the mass of flowers that make for conversation but the rare one or unusually large one, or the artistic arrangement of the mass. People do not go to a circus to see calves but a two-headed calf. Whether one likes it or not, that is how God made human nature — and a good conversationalist must recognize it. He must go about observing the news-worthy things. After all, every talk is a sort of newspaper in miniature. If he reports merely the sensational but worthless, he is a police gazette; if he reports the unusual and helpful, he is a good news