E. B. White
It's hard to know when to respond to the seductiveness of the world and when to respond to its challenge. If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between the desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.Collection: Morning
I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially.Collection: Inspirational
A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom- he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.Collection: Cracks
You 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? We'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.Collection: Life
I am always humbled by the infite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.Collection: Blue
Why did you do all this for me?' he asked. 'I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you.' 'You have been my friend,' replied Charlotte. 'That in itself is a tremendous thing.Collection: Friendship
A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there in a book, you may have your question answeredCollection: Book
A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist - nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.Collection: Time
Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.Collection: Grandma
"Have you ever found anything that gives you relief?" "Yes. A drink."Collection: Giving
Even now; with a thousand little voyages notched in my belt. I still feel a memorial chill on casting off.Collection: Casting Off
Dentistry is more impressive in town-what the rural man calls cleaning the teeth is called "prophylaxis" in New York.Collection: New York
The complaint about modern steel furniture, modern glass houses, modern red bars and modern streamlined trains and cars is that all these objets modernize, while adequate and amusing in themselves, tend to make the people who use them look dated. It is an honest criticism. The human race has done nothing much about changing its own appearance to conform to the form and texture of its appurtenances.Collection: Race
As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left us in a bad time.Collection: Hope
There is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place.Collection: Dream
The bonus is really one of the great give-aways in business enterprise. It is the annual salve applied to the conscience of the rich and the wounds of the poor.Collection: Giving
Much of our adult morality, in books and out of them, has a stuffiness unworthy of childhood. Our grown-up conclusions often rest on perilously soft bottom.Collection: Book
The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. Because I have the greatest respect for the reader, and if he's going to the trouble of reading what I've written -- I'm a slow reader myself and I guess most people are -- why, the least I can do is make it as easy as possible for him to find out what I'm trying to say, trying to get at. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.Collection: Reading
I have a spaniel that defrocked a nun last week. He took hold of the cord. I had hold of the leash. It was like elephants holding tails. Imagine me undressing a nun, even second hand.Collection: Funny
The H-bomb rather favors small nations that doesn't as yet possess it; they feel slightly more free to jostle other nations, having discovered that a country can stick its tongue out quite far these days without provoking war, so horrible are war's consequences.Collection: Country
Television should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua, our Minsky's and our Camelot.Collection: Television
Humor is like a frog. You can dissect it to see how it works, but by then, it's dead.Collection: Frogs
Sometimes a writer, like an acrobat, must try a trick that is too much for him.Collection: Trying
A breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that pops into his head is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day.Collection: Style
Although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one.Collection: Writing
We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. . . . The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witch hunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist.Collection: Loyalty
I discovered, though, that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life's more stereotyped roles.Collection: Pigs
If sometimes there seems to be a sort of sameness of sound in The New Yorker, it probably can be traced to the magazine's copydesk, which is a marvelous fortress of grammatical exactitude and stylish convention.Collection: Sound
It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible.Collection: New York
new york provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing.Collection: New York
Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.Collection: Passion
An unhatched egg is to me the greatest challenge in life.Collection: Life
There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed.Collection: Writing
There is simply a better chance of doing well if the writer holds a steady course, enters the stream of English quietly, and does not thrash about.Collection: Doe
Writing is not an exercise in excision, it's a journey into sound.Collection: Writing
Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.Collection: Writing
Advice from this elderly practitioner is to forget publishers and just roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in your subject.Collection: Writing
What do you mean less than nothing? I don't think there is any such thing as less than nothing. Nothing is absolutely the limit of nothingness. It's the lowest you can go. It's the end of the line. How can something be less than nothing? If there were something that was less than nothing, then nothing would not be nothing, it would be something - even though it's just a very little bit of something. But if nothing is nothing, then nothing has nothing that is less than it is.Collection: Mean
The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year - the days when summer is changing into autumn - the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.Collection: Beautiful
America is now liberty-conscious. In a single generation it has progressed from being toothbrush-conscious, to being air-minded, to being liberty-conscious.Collection: Air
You have been my friends. That in itself is a tremendous thing.Collection: Friendship
Write about it by day and dream about it by night.Collection: Dream
Americans are willing to go to enormous trouble and expense defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and expense advocating them with words. Temperamentally we are ready to die for certain principles (or, in the case of overripe adults, send youngsters to die), but we show little inclination to advertise the reasons for dying.Collection: Political
Advice to young writers wo want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man, write about a man.Collection: Writing
It sometimes takes days, even weeks, before a dog's nerves tire. In the case of terriers it can run into months.Collection: Funny
But we have received a sign, Edith - a mysterious sign. A miracle has happened on this farm... in the middle of the web there were the words 'Some Pig'... we have no ordinary pig." "Well", said Mrs. Zuckerman, "it seems to me you're a little off. It seems to me we have no ordinary spider.Collection: Pigs
I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision, we shall discover a new and unbearable disturbance of the modern peace, or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television - of that I am quite sure.Collection: Believe
Don't write about Man; write about a man.Collection: Writing
In order to read one must sit down, usually indoors. I am restless and would rather sail a boat than crack a book. I've never had a very lively literary curiosity, and it has sometimes seemed to me that I am not really a literary fellow at all. Except that I write for a living.Collection: Book