The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.
E. B. WHITEThe world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.
More E. B. White Quotes
-
-
Is there anything in the universe more beautiful and protective than the simple complexity of a spider’s web?
E. B. WHITE -
A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer… He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
E. B. WHITE -
I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty-everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?
E. B. WHITE -
Creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.
E. B. WHITE -
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.
E. B. WHITE -
The city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.
E. B. WHITE -
Early summer days are a jubilee time for birds. In the fields, around the house, in the barn, in the woods, in the swamp – everywhere love and songs and nests and eggs.
E. B. WHITE -
A really companionable and indispensable dog is an accident of nature. You can’t get it by breeding for it, and you can’t buy it with money. It just happens along.
E. B. WHITE -
The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.
E. B. WHITE -
A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. … A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy: true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.
E. B. WHITE -
In a man’s middle years there is scarcely a part of the body he would hesitate to turn over to the proper authorities.
E. B. WHITE -
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.
E. B. WHITE -
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.
E. B. WHITE -
One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.
E. B. WHITE -
Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.
E. B. WHITE