Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like "enthralling" and "luminous."

Good writers are visible just behind their words.

Be grateful for every word you can cut.

Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty. The sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and graceful boughs and frisky kittens and sleepy lagoons.

Writers can write to affirm and to celebrate, or they can write to debunk and destroy; the choice is ours.

I almost always urge people to write in the first person. ... Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.

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