If you want to "get in touch with your feelings," fine, talk to yourself. We all do. But if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order, give them a purpose, use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce. The secret way to do this is to write it down, and then cut out the confusing parts.

Dangling punch lines to forgotten stories remain in the language like the smile of the Cheshire cat.

Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.

You don't overturn a previous court's decisions lightly and I think most Americans are somewhere in the middle on abortion and there's not going to be a revolution here at all.

A reader ought to be able to hold it and become familiar with its organized contents and make it a mind's manageable companion.

I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.

If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.