Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.

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.

There is simply a better chance of doing well if the writer holds a steady course, enters the stream of English quietly, and does not thrash about.

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

The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for nature to follow. Now we just set the clocks an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.

new york provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing.

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.