Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.

What I want to do is to make people laugh so that they'll see things seriously.

One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.

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.

Writing is hard work.

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