In reply to letter from a student at Sydney University (W. L. Curnow, son of the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald) inviting him to address a club meeting and simultaneously apologizing for the boyishness of his enthusiasm, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote reassuringly:

Thanks for your letter. If boyish at all, it was so in the good sense of which a young man need not be ashamed, and an old man (if he can preserve it) has cause to be proud. I am glad to have interested you; I will tell you in confidence—I only care to be read by young men; they alone can read. I read now, yes and with pleasure; but some years ago I read with the greed and gusto of a pig, sucking up some of the very paper (you would think) into my brain. And that is the only kind of reading for which it is worthwhile to support the pains of writing…^[i]