Place yourself in the background; write in a way that comes naturally; work from a suitable design; write with nouns and verbs; do not overwrite; do not overstate; avoid the use of qualifiers; do not affect a breezy style; use orthodox spelling; do not explain too much; avoid fancy words; do not take shortcuts as the cost of clarity; prefer the standard to the offbeat; make sure the reader knows who is speaking; do not use dialect; revise and rewrite.
E. B. WhiteUnderstanding humor is like dissecting a live frog. It can be done, but the frog tends to die in the process.
E. B. WhiteLife is always rich and steady time when you are waiting for something to happen or to hatch.
E. B. WhiteThe only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change and we all instinctively avoid it.
E. B. WhiteI discovered, though, that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life's more stereotyped roles.
E. B. WhiteNationalism has two fatal charms for its devotees: It presupposes local self-sufficiency, which is a pleasant and desirable condition, and it suggests, very subtly, a certain personal superiority by reason of one's belonging to a place which is definable and familiar, as against a place that is strange, remote.
E. B. WhiteSecurity, for me, took a tumble not when I read that there were Communists in Hollywood but when I read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control. If a man is in health, he doesn't need to take anybody else's temperature to know where he is going.
E. B. WhiteNauseous. Nauseated. The first means "sickening to contemplate"; the second means "sick at the stomach." Do not, therefore, say "I feel nauseous," unless you are sure you have that effect on others.
E. B. WhiteDelay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer-he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive with him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along.
E. B. WhiteThe main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.
E. B. WhiteThe mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up.
E. B. WhiteA candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.
E. B. WhiteThere 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.
E. B. WhiteAs a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly and unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost.
E. B. WhiteThurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.
E. B. WhiteWhen we think of [John F. Kennedy], he is without a hat, standing in the wind and weather. He was impatient of topcoats and hats, preferring to be exposed, and he was young enough and tough enough to enjoy the cold and the wind of those times.... It can be said of him, as of few men in a like position, that he did not fear the weather, and did not trim his sails, but instead challenged the wind itself, to improve its direction and to cause it to blow more softly and more kindly over the world and its people.
E. B. WhiteDemocracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.
E. B. WhiteDentistry is more impressive in town-what the rural man calls cleaning the teeth is called "prophylaxis" in New York.
E. B. WhiteThe theme of 'Charlotte's Web' is that a pig shall be saved, and I have an idea that somewhere deep inside me there was a wish to that effect.
E. B. WhiteThe whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.
E. B. WhiteIt is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression.
E. B. WhiteA man must have something to cling to. Without that he is as a pea vine sprawling in search of a trellis.... I was all asprawl, clinging to Beauty, which is a very restless trellis.
E. B. WhiteI believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision, we shall discover a new and unbearable disturbance of the modern peace, or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television - of that I am quite sure.
E. B. WhiteIn a man's middle years there is scarcely a part of the body he would hesitate to turn over to the proper authorities.
E. B. WhiteFern was up at daylight, trying to rid the world of injustice. As a result, she now has a pig. A small one to be sure, but nevertheless a pig. It just shows what can happen if a person gets out of bed promptly.
E. B. WhiteIn 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.
E. B. WhiteThe siren south is well enough, but New York, at the beginning of March, is a hoyden we would not care to miss--a drafty wench, her temperature up and down, full of bold promises and dust in the eye.
E. B. WhiteI would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
E. B. WhiteA man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist - nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.
E. B. WhiteIn a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.
E. B. WhiteThere is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed.
E. B. WhiteIn order to read one must sit down, usually indoors. I am restless and would rather sail a boat than crack a book. I've never had a very lively literary curiosity, and it has sometimes seemed to me that I am not really a literary fellow at all. Except that I write for a living.
E. B. WhiteBy comparison with other less hectic days, the city is unconfortable and inconvenient; but New Yorkers tempramentally do not crave comfort and convenience - if they did they would live elsewhere.
E. B. WhiteComputing machines perhaps can do the work of a dozen ordinary men, but there is no machine that can do the work of one extraordinary man.
E. B. WhiteEvery American, to the last man, lays claim to a "sense" of humor and guards it as his most significant spiritual trait, yet rejects humor as a contaminating element wherever found. America is a nation of comics and comedians; nevertheless, humor has no stature and is accepted only after the death of the perpetrator.
E. B. White