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.

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

Good writers are visible just behind their words.

Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind.

Never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation. Be yourself when you write. If you're not a person who says 'indeed' or 'moreover,' or who calls someone an individual ('he's a fine individual'), please don't write it.

The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn't induce him to continue to the third sentence, it's equally dead.

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