Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the "content" of the other, obscuring the operation of both.

During the Second War, the U.S.O. sent special issues of the principal American magazines to the Armed Forces, with the ads omitted. The men insisted on having the ads back again. Naturally. The ads are by far the best part of any magazine or newspaper. More pains and thought, more wit and art go into the making of an ad than into any prose feature of press or magazine. Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news.

Most clear writing is a sign that there is no exploration going on. Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.

Nowadays there is no conversation at all. Teachers distrust talk as much as business men.

Gramophone and movies were merely the mechanization of speech and gesture. But the radio and TV were not just the electronification of speech and gesture but the electronification of the entire range of human personal expressiveness. With electronification the flow is taken out of the wire and into the vacuum tube circuit, which confers freedom and flexibility such as are in metaphor and in words themselves.

The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus.

Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener.