410 Quotes by E.B. White

An unhatched egg is to me the greatest challenge in life.

A 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.

Very fine law,” said Stuart. “When I am Chairman, anybody who is mean to anybody else is going to catch it.

Don’t write about Man; write about a man.

It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible.

The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.

Not even a collapsing world looks dark to a man who is about to make his fortune.

In dialogue, make sure that your attributives do not awkwardly interrupt a spoken sentence. Place them where the breath would come naturally in speech-that is, where the speaker would pause for emphasis, or take a breath. The best test for locating an attributive is to speak the sentence aloud.

Computing machines perhaps can do the work of a dozen ordinary men, but there is no machine that can do the work of one extraordinary man.