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

A simple [writing] style is the result of very hard work.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.

Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.

If writing seems hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things people do.

If you would like to write better than everybody else, you have to want to write better than everybody else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you've written against the various middlemen - editors, agents and publishers - whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards not so high.

A writer is always working.