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Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays
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
Writing
Effrontery
Stamina
Essays
Centered
Write
Persons
Person
Self
More quotes by E. B. White
Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people-- people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.
E. B. White
Even now with a thousand little voyages notched in my belt. I still feel a memorial chill on casting off.
E. B. White
Television will enormously enlarge the eye's range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.
E. B. White
Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.
E. B. White
A “fraternity” is the antithesis offraternity. The first (that is, the order or organization) is predicated on the idea of exclusion the second (that is, the abstract thing) is based on a feeling of total equality.
E. B. White
Just to live in the country is a full-time job. You don't have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.
E. B. White
Advice to young writers wo want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man, write about a man.
E. B. White
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
E. B. White
Semi-colons only prove that the author has been to college.
E. B. White
Democracy is itself, a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have.
E. B. White
A really companionable and indispensable dog is an accident of nature. You can't get it by breeding for it, and you can't buy it with money. It just happens along.
E. B. White
I am still encouraged to go on. I wouldn't know where else to go.
E. B. White
Half a man's life is devoted to what he calls improvements, yet the original had some quality which is lost in the process.
E. B. White
If sometimes there seems to be a sort of sameness of sound in The New Yorker, it probably can be traced to the magazine's copydesk, which is a marvelous fortress of grammatical exactitude and stylish convention.
E. B. White
Sometimes a writer, like an acrobat, must try a trick that is too much for him.
E. B. White
Home was quite a place when people stayed there.
E. B. White
The rat had no morals, no conscience, no scruples, no consideration, no decency, no milk of rodent kindness, no compunctions, no higher feeling, no friendliness, no anything
E. B. White
new york provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing.
E. B. White
Use the smallest word that does the job.
E. B. White
The world likes humor, but it treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with Brussels sprouts.
E. B. White
