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In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone.

E. B. White

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E. B. White
Age: 86 †
Born: 1899
Born: July 11
Died: 1985
Died: October 1
Editor
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Mount Vernon
New York
Elwyn Brooks White
E.B. White
Inspirational
Expected
Country
Writers
Pay
Design
Exhibit
Duty
Exhibits
Literature
Harmonious
Attention
Dictatorship
Free
Tone

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Television should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua, our Minsky's and our Camelot.
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I have one share in corporate Earth, and I am nervous about the management.
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Einstein is loved because he is gentle, respected because he is wise. Relativity being not for most of us, we elevate its author to a position somewhere between Edison, who gave us a tangible gleam, and God, who gave us the difficult dark and the hope of penetrating it.
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Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor.
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You have been my friends. That in itself is a tremendous thing.
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By comparison with other less hectic days, the city is unconfortable and inconvenient but New Yorkers tempramentally do not crave comfort and convenience - if they did they would live elsewhere.
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Humor is like a frog. You can dissect it to see how it works, but by then, it's dead.
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I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
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Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.
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I seldom went to bed before two or three o'clock in the morning, on the theory that if anything of interest were to happen to a young man it would almost certainly happen late at night.
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The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.
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Not even a collapsing world looks dark to a man who is about to make his fortune.
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But we have received a sign, Edith - a mysterious sign. A miracle has happened on this farm... in the middle of the web there were the words 'Some Pig'... we have no ordinary pig. Well, said Mrs. Zuckerman, it seems to me you're a little off. It seems to me we have no ordinary spider.
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Humour plays close to the big, hot fire, which is the truth, and the reader feels the heat.
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Diplomacy is the lowest form of politeness because it misquotes the greatest number of people. A nation, like an individual, if it has anything to say, should simply say it.
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As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading-the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the resspondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.
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A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express a precise meaning.
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A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.
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The world likes humor, but it treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with Brussels sprouts.
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New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.
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