Unlike medicine or the other sciences, writing has no new discoveries to spring on us. - P297
If you would like to write better than everybody else, you have to want to write better than everybody else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you’ve written against the various middlemen—editors, agents and publishers—whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards not as high. Too many writers are browbeaten into settling for less than their best. - P298
Ideally the relationship between a writer and an editor should be one of negotiation and trust. - P300
But finally the purposes that writers serve must be their own. What you write is yours and nobody else’s. Take your talent as far as you can and guard it with your life. - P302
My favorite definition of a careful writer comes from Joe DiMaggio, though he didn’t know that’s what he was defining. - P302
A reporter once asked him how he managed to play so well so consistently, and he said: "I always thought that there was at least one person in the stands who had never seen me play, and I didn’t want to let him down." - P302
You learn to write by writing. It’s a truism, but what makes it a truism is that it’s true. The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis. - P49
Here’s how a typical piece by E. B. White begins: I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting. - P231
Probably the biggest fear for nonfiction writers is the fear of not being able to bring off their assignment. With fiction it’s a different situation. - P244
Besides wanting to write as well as possible, I wanted to write as entertainingly as possible. - P296
Yet to defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive. I’m a known crank on this issue—I fight over every semicolon. - P291
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