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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

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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
Men
Calls
Life
Improvement
Originals
Original
Quality
Half
Process
Improvements
Lost
Devoted

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The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.
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Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society — things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed.
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When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure.
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A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.
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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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Television should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua, our Minsky's and our Camelot.
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Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.
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There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed.
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I would really rather feel bad in Maine than feel good anywhere else
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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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In middle life, the human back is spoiling for a technical knockout and will use the flimsiest excuse, even a sneeze, to fall apart.
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Don't write about Man write about a man.
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The circus comes as close to being the world in microcosm as anything I know in a way, it puts all the rest of show business in the shade.
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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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It is at a fair that man can be drunk forever on liquor, love, or fights at a fair that your front pocket can be picked by a trotting horse looking for sugar, and your hind pocket by a thief looking for his fortune.
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new york provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing.
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Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.
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My prose style at this time was a stomach-twisting blend of the Bible, Carl Sandburg, H.L. Mencken, Jeffrey Farnol, Christopher Morley, Samuel Pepys, and Franklin Pierce Adams imitating Samuel Pepys. I was quite apt to throw in a bless the mark at any spot, and to begin a sentence with Lord comma.
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It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than to his planet the bylaws are shorter, and he is personally acquainted with the other members.
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I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary: one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it.
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