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The most puzzling thing about TV is the steady advance of the sponsor across the line that has always separated news from promotion, entertainment from merchandising. The advertiser has assumed the role of originator, and the performer has gradually been eased into the role of peddler.

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
Roles
Performers
Puzzling
Media
Advance
Advertisers
Lines
Steady
Sponsors
Peddler
Thing
Entertainment
Performer
Advertiser
Always
Across
Assumed
Originator
Role
Separated
Eased
Line
Promotion
Merchandising
News
Gradually
Sponsor

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A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.
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Television should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua, our Minsky's and our Camelot.
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I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.
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By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.
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Habitually creative people are prepared to be lucky.
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I am reminded of the advice of my neighbor. Never worry about your heart till it stops beating.
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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.
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The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Humour plays close to the big, hot fire, which is the truth, and the reader feels the heat.
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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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A poet dares to be just so clear and no clearer he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
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I have a spaniel that defrocked a nun last week. He took hold of the cord. I had hold of the leash. It was like elephants holding tails. Imagine me undressing a nun, even second hand.
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No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
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