“Semi-colons only prove that the author has been to college.”

A schoolchild should be taught grammar-for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy.

We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.

Make the work interesting and the discipline will take care of itself.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

Why did you do all this for me?’ he asked. ‘I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.’ ‘You have been my friend,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing.

You can dissect a joke just as you can a frog. But it tends to die on you.

I am always humbled by the infite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.

A right is a responsibility in reverse.

Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.

To achieve style, begin by affecting none.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society – things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed.

Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention.

Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.

Loneliness is a strange gift.

Well,” said Stuart, “a misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone.

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.

Time is of no account with great thoughts, which are as fresh to -day as when they first passed through their authors’ minds ages ago.

Most of the more celebrated names among African-American authors, poets, and artists are known to the world because of their association with specific cultural arts movements.

An author accepting language’s invitation to dance steps onto the floor of his her sensibility-charged consciousness and begins to move instinctively–even if with much dread

Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process–it is, after all, black magic.

Negative space is important. When I teach students to read critically I advise them to look for what the author isn’t saying just as carefully as for what he or she is.

Your source material is the people you know, not those you don’t know, but every character is an extension of the author’s own personality.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.