Habitually creative people are prepared to be lucky.
E. B. WHITEHabitually creative people are prepared to be lucky.
E. B. WHITEWe’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.
E. B. WHITEAn editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.
E. B. WHITENo one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
E. B. WHITEIn 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. WHITETelevision 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. WHITEA poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.
E. B. WHITEI have one share in corporate Earth, and I am nervous about the management.
E. B. WHITEYou have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway?
E. B. WHITEUse the smallest word that does the job.
E. B. WHITEI arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
E. B. WHITELife’s meaning has always eluded me and I guess always will. But I love it just the same.
E. B. WHITEI’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. WHITEThe whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.
E. B. WHITEMother: It’s broccoli, dear. — Child: I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.
E. B. WHITEA 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