E. B. White

“There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hou...”

“The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gu...”

“Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quic...”

“Remember that writing is translation, and the opus to be translated is yourself.”

“All I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.”

“We teach our child many things I don’t believe in, and almost nothing I do believe in. We teach punctuality, particularly if the enforcement of it disturbs the peace. My father taught me, by...”

“Life is like writing with a pen. You can cross out your past but you can't erase it.”

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

“It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than to his planet; the bylaws are shorter, and he is personally acquainted with the other members.”

“The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man's adjustment to it, the speed of his acceptance.”

“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”

“A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.”

“All we need is a meteorologist who has once been soaked to the skin without ill effect. No one can write knowingly of the weather who walks bent over on wet days.”

“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.”

“When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and...”

“I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.”

“Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.”

“Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.”

“The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it.”

“The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.”