Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.

Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.

Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page...Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise.

Not every oak has to be gnarled, every detective hard-bitten. The adjective that exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and an obstacle for the reader.

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

There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.

Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.