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

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.

Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.

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.

No one has something original or important to say will willing we run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief

The best way to learn to write is to study the work of the men and women who are doing the kind of writing you want to do.

Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind.