Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.

A writer is obviously at his most natural and relaxed when he writes in the first person. Writing is a personal transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and the transaction will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity.

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

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.

Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.

Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.

Writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.