When snow accumulates week after week, month after month, it works curious miracles.

Semi-colons only prove that the author has been to college.

Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.

In the nature of things, a person engaged in the flimsy business of expressing himself on paper is dependent on the large general privilege of being heard. Any intimation that this privilege may be revoked throws a writer into panic.

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.

Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention.

Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays