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

If writing seems hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things people do.

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

There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.

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.

Dare to tell the smallest of stories if you want to generate large emotions.

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.