E. B. White Quotes about Writing

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

Writing is both mask and unveiling.

The best writing is rewriting.

Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.

Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays

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

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.

Use the smallest word that does the job.

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, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth.... Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words and they backhand them across the net.

A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. ... A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy: true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

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 hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.

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

All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation-it is the Self-escaping into the open.

I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that does not have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular.

As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly and unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost.

There is no satisfactory explanation of style, no infallible guide to good writing, no assurance that a person who thinks clearly will be able to write clearly, no key that unlocks the door, no inflexible rules by which the young writer may steer his course. He will often find himself steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.

Writing is not an exercise in excision, it's a journey into sound.

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.

Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.

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.