Make the work interesting and the discipline will take care of itself.
E. B. WHITEGenius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
More E. B. White Quotes
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Understanding humor is like dissecting a live frog. It can be done, but the frog tends to die in the process.
E. B. WHITE -
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.
E. B. WHITE -
Nationalism has two fatal charms for its devotees: It presupposes local self-sufficiency, which is a pleasant and desirable condition, and it suggests, very subtly, a certain personal superiority by reason of one’s belonging to a place which is definable and familiar, as against a place that is strange, remote.
E. B. WHITE -
An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.
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 -
Life is like writing with a pen. You can cross out your past but you can’t erase it.
E. B. WHITE -
Writing is both mask and unveiling.
E. B. WHITE -
Democracy is itself, a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have.
E. B. WHITE -
Geese are friends to no one, they bad mouth everybody and everything. But they are companionable once you get used to their ingratitude and false accusations.
E. B. WHITE -
I am always humbled by the infite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.
E. B. WHITE -
In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty.
E. B. WHITE -
Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy.
E. B. WHITE -
A poet’s pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.
E. B. WHITE -
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.
E. B. WHITE -
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.
E. B. WHITE