Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Proceed with confidence, generating it, if necessary, by pure willpower. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.

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.

Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.

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

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

One of the saddest sentences I know is "I wish I had asked my mother about that." Or my father. Or my grandmother. Or my grandfather. As every parent knows, our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are.

I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.