If you lose the dullards back in the dust, that's where they belong. You don't want them anyway.

My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.

Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty. The sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and graceful boughs and frisky kittens and sleepy lagoons.

Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.

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.

Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a possible hernia.

Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.