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

To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.

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.

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

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

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

You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: what does the reader need to know next?