Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.

Be wary of security as a goal. It may often look like life's best prize. Usually it's not.

Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.

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

To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.

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

Editors are licensed to be curious.