Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.

Many writers are paralyzed by the thought that they are competing with everybody else who is trying to write and presumably doing it better.... Forget the competition and go at your own pace. Your only contest is with yourself.

Writing is such lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up. If something strikes me as funny in the act of writing, I throw it in just to amuse myself. If I think it's funny I assume a few other people will find it funny, and that seems to me to be a good day's work.

You learn to write by writing.

Writing is hard work.

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

Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident. . . . Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader's trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.