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Habitually creative people are prepared to be lucky.

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
People
Habitually
Prepared
Lucky
Creative

More quotes by E. B. White

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It sometimes takes days, even weeks, before a dog's nerves tire. In the case of terriers it can run into months.
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I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty—everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?
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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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If I can fool a bug... I can surely fool a man. People are not as smart as bugs.
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Even now with a thousand little voyages notched in my belt. I still feel a memorial chill on casting off.
E. B. White
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Diplomacy is the lowest form of politeness because it misquotes the greatest number of people. A nation, like an individual, if it has anything to say, should simply say it.
E. B. White
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Sometimes a writer, like an acrobat, must try a trick that is too much for him.
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I have one share in corporate Earth, and I am nervous about the management.
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A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist - nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.
E. B. White
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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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Advice from this elderly practitioner is to forget publishers and just roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in your subject.
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I don't understand it, and I don't like what I don't understand.
E. B. White
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We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.
E. B. White
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In order to read one must sit down, usually indoors. I am restless and would rather sail a boat than crack a book. I've never had a very lively literary curiosity, and it has sometimes seemed to me that I am not really a literary fellow at all. Except that I write for a living.
E. B. White
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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
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I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
E. B. White
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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
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A breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that pops into his head is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day.
E. B. White
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Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.
E. B. White
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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