A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there in a book, you may have your question answered

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.

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

In dialogue, make sure that your attributives do not awkwardly interrupt a spoken sentence. Place them where the breath would come naturally in speech-that is, where the speaker would pause for emphasis, or take a breath. The best test for locating an attributive is to speak the sentence aloud.

All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation-it is the Self-escaping into the open.

Once in everyone's life there is apt to be a period when he is fully awake, instead of half-asleep.

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.