“Habitually creative people are prepared to be lucky.”

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.

The whole problem is to establish communication with ones self.

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.

I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.

A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.

Use the smallest word that does the job.

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

Creatures of similar plumages habitually congregate in places of closest proximity.

It is because of our unassailable enthusiasm, our profound reverence for education, that we habitually demand of it the impossible. The teacher is expected to perform a choice and varied series of miracles.