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Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.
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
Prefer
Safety
Freedom
Wells
Well
Good
More quotes by E. B. White
Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.
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
Creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.
E. B. White
Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.
E. B. White
A right is a responsibility in reverse.
E. B. White
Humour plays close to the big, hot fire, which is the truth, and the reader feels the heat.
E. B. White
Although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one.
E. B. White
It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.
E. B. White
Why is it, do you suppose, that an Englishman is unhappy until he has explained America?
E. B. White
Good deeds never go unpunished.
E. B. White
Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
E. B. White
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.
E. B. White
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.
E. B. White
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
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
There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.
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.
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
I am still encouraged to go on. I wouldn't know where else to go.
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.
E. B. White
