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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.
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
Write
Writing
Rewrite
Thing
Editing
Trying
Main
Make
Clearly
Good
Deal
Deals
Clear
More quotes by E. B. White
All poets who, when reading from their own works,m experience a choked feeling, are major. For that matter, all poets who read from their own works are major, whether they choke or not.
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When my wife's Aunt Caroline was in her nineties, she lived with us, and she once remarked: 'Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.' I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive word.
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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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I can still see my first dog. For six years he met me at the same place after school and convoyed me home - a service he thought up himself. A boy doesn't forget that sort of association.
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
Don't write about Man write about a man.
E. B. White
It seemed to me that I should have a desk, even though I had no real need for a desk. I was afraid that if I had no desk in my room my life would seem too haphazard.
E. B. White
A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express a precise meaning.
E. B. White
A right is a responsibility in reverse.
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The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay
E. B. White
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.
E. B. White
Although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one.
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
A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. ... A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy: true, not false lively, not dull accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.
E. B. White
A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.
E. B. White
The beginner should approach style warily, realizing that it is himself he is approaching, no other and he should begin by turning resolutely away from all devices that are popularly believed to indicate style - all mannerisms, tricks, adornments. The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.
E. B. White
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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A schoolchild should be taught grammar - for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy. Having learned about the exciting mysteries of an English sentence, the child can then go forth and speak and write any damn way he pleases.
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Stuart rose from the ditch, climbed into his car, and started up the road that led toward the north...As he peeked ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.
E. B. White
We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. . . . The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witch hunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist.
E. B. White
