In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. — E. B. White Copy Share Image
The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
I can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat. — E. B. White Copy Share Image
When a man hangs from a tree it doesn't spell justice unless he helped write the law that hanged him. — E. B. White Copy Share Image
The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays — E. B. White Copy Share Image
A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy. — E. B. White Copy Share Image
A breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that pops into his head is… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
There is simply a better chance of doing well if the writer holds a steady course, enters the stream of English quietly,… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
I always write a thing first and think about it afterward, which is not a bad procedure because the easiest way to… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn't have a slant. All writing slants the way… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
I have always felt that the first duty of a writer was to ascend - to make flights, carrying others along if… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation-it is the Self-escaping into the open. — E. B. White Copy Share Image
Place yourself in the background; write in a way that comes naturally; work from a suitable design; write with nouns and verbs;… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
“...a writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
When you consider that there are a thousand ways to express even the simplest idea, it is no wonder writers are under… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. ... A writer has the… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. Because I have the greatest respect for the… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading-the writer, who is the… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life. — E. B. White Copy Share Image
Although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one. — E. B. White Copy Share Image
Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. — E. B. White Copy Share Image
Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer-he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
In dialogue, make sure that your attributives do not awkwardly interrupt a spoken sentence. Place them where the breath would come naturally… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I think I would lose what little value… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
I discovered a long time ago that writing of the small things of the day, the trivial matters of the heart, the… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
“To hear, in the short space of one week, a Scottish terrier booed by an audience and President Roosevelt criticized by Charles Lindbergh was… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
The sea answers all questions, and always in the same way; for when you read in the papers the interminable discussions and the bickering… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man's adjustment to it, the speed… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
When my wife's Aunt Caroline was in her nineties, she lived with us, and she once remarked: 'Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. — E. B. White Copy Share Image
A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. ... A writer has the duty to… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. This makes it hard to plan… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
I seldom went to bed before two or three o'clock in the morning, on the theory that if anything of interest were to happen… — E. B. White Copy Share Image
Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma. — E. B. White Copy Share Image
