English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.

Creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.

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

When my wife's Aunt Caroline was in her nineties, she lived with us, and she once remarked: 'Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.' I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive word.

The best writing is rewriting.

You can dissect a joke just as you can a frog. But it tends to die on you.

Most people think of peace as a state of Nothing Bad Happening, or Nothing Much Happening. Yet if peace is to overtake us and make us the gift of serenity and well-being, it will have to be the state of Something Good Happening.