“It is quite possible that an animal has spoken to me and that I didn’t catch the remark because I wasn’t paying attention.”

A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.

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

There’s no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.

Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. And when you are reading a book, you and the author are alone together-just the two of you.

The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.

Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They’ll believe anything they see in print.

People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust.

From morning till night, sounds drift from the kitchen, most of them familiar and comforting. . . . On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen is the place you can find it; it dries the wet sock, it cools the hot little brain.

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.

Never hurry and never worry!

Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day. But if we forget to savor the world, what possible reason do we have for saving it? In a way, the savoring must come first.

And then, just as Wilbur was settling down for his morning nap, he heard again the thin voice that had addressed him the night before. “Salutations!” said the voice. Wilbur jumped to his feet. “Salu-what?” he cried. “Salutations!” repeated the voice.

If a man is to be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most.

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.

Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice.

There is a story of an Oxford student who once remarked, “I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didn’t like.”

I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.

A man and still more the woman, who can be accused either of doing “what nobody does,” or of not doing “what everybody does,” is the subject of as much depreciatory remark as if he or she had committed some grave moral delinquency.

I believe one of the reasons we went through such a remarkable growth period was that we had this atmosphere of free discussion.

What strikes me about Jesus is that he is a remarkably true person; he never changes his personality to fit in with whatever crowd he finds himself. He is simply himself, and he never plays to his audience.

They, I think, despised her remarks about the flawed 2011 elections in Russia. They feared that she would be very tough on Russia in terms of sanctions.

Man must spend much more time in extraordinary natural places to grasp much better how remarkable our planet is and to realise what a great privilege and what an enormous joy to be living here!