“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.”

An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.

When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do. Or what the weather does. This sustains me very well indeed.

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

Before the seed there comes the thought of bloom.

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

Writing is both mask and unveiling.

Extreme cold when it first arrives seems to generate cheerfulness and sociability. For a few hours all life’s dubious problems are dropped in favor of the clear and congenial task of keeping alive.

Nauseous. Nauseated. The first means “sickening to contemplate”; the second means “sick at the stomach.” Do not, therefore, say “I feel nauseous,” unless you are sure you have that effect on others.

“What are they, and where are you?” screamed Wilbur. “Please, please, tell me where you are. And what are salutations?” “Salutations are greetings,” said the voice. “When I say ‘salutations,’ it’s just my fancy way of saying hello or good morning.

Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter.

All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation-it is the Self-escaping into the open.

Mother: It’s broccoli, dear. — Child: I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.

The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.

I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.

The philosophy behind much advertising is based on the old observation that every man is really two men – the man he is and the man he wants to be.

Advertising is legalized lying.

I’ve spent so many years waiting for publishers to consider whether they wanted to print a book of mine, making contracts, taking months to fit it into the Fall list or the Spring list, fitting it into an advertising plan.

Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved – commitment to a scenario.

I started selling out comedy clubs before I got to town with no advertising. I was selling out theaters just on the rumor that I was going to be there.

Some people want to advertise their weirdness, and spread it out, that’s not me.

Strategy and timing are the Himalayas of marketing. Everything else is the Catskills.

What should a brand leader advertise?