Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like.

Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a possible hernia.

Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.

Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.

Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I'd say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.

The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to the education and rank.