If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.

There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to say is the right method for you.

Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.

Also bear in mind, when you're choosing your words and stringing them together, how they sound. This may seem absurd: readers read with their eyes. But in fact they hear what they are reading far more than you realize.

Clutter is the disease of American writing.

If you lose the dullards back in the dust, that's where they belong. You don't want them anyway.

Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.