One great aim of revision is to cut out. In the exuberance of composition it is natural to throw in - as one does in speaking - a number of small words that add nothing to meaning but keep up the flow and rhythm of thought. In writing, not only does this surplusage not add to meaning, it subtracts from it. Read and revise, reread and revise, keeping reading and revising until your text seems adequate to your thought.

The philosophical implication of race-thinking is that by offering us the mystery of heredity as an explanation, it diverts our attention from the social and intellectual factors that make up personality.

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

Time and rest are needed for absorption. Psychologists confirm that it is really in the summer that our muscles learn to skate and in the winter, how to swim.

Of true knowledge at any time, a good part is merely convenient, necessary indeed to the worker, but not to an understanding of his subject: One can judge a building without knowing where to buy the bricks; one can understand a violin sonata without knowing how to score for the instrument. The work may in fact be better understood without a knowledge of the details of its manufacture, of attention to these tends to distract from meaning and effect.

After being boxed in by man and his constructions in Europe and the East, the release into space is exhilarating. The horizon is a huge remote circle, and no hills intervene.

I once worked as a salesman and was very independent. I took orders from no one.