Also bear in mind, when you're choosing your words and stringing them together, how they sound. This may seem absurd: readers read with their eyes. But in fact they hear what they are reading far more than you realize.

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

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

Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.

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.

Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.

Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist's head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.