Sometimes a writer, like an acrobat, must try a trick that is too much for him.

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

An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.

Good deeds never go unpunished.

The essayist . . . can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter - philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil's advocate, enthusiast.

Old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself - a lad of about 19.

A single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for the reader, the object of the writer's enthusiasm.