The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.

Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.

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.

My commodity as a writer, whatever I'm writing about, is me. And your commodity is you. Don't alter your voice to fit the subject. Develop one voice that readers will recognize when they hear it on the page, a voice that's enjoyable not only in its musical line but in its avoidance of sounds that would cheapen its tone: breeziness and condescension and clichés.

Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.

Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.

What I want to do is to make people laugh so that they'll see things seriously.