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

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

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

In the nature of things, a person engaged in the flimsy business of expressing himself on paper is dependent on the large general privilege of being heard. Any intimation that this privilege may be revoked throws a writer into panic.

I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary: one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it.

Write about it by day and dream about it by night.

My prose style at this time was a stomach-twisting blend of the Bible, Carl Sandburg, H.L. Mencken, Jeffrey Farnol, Christopher Morley, Samuel Pepys, and Franklin Pierce Adams imitating Samuel Pepys. I was quite apt to throw in a "bless the mark" at any spot, and to begin a sentence with "Lord" comma.

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

I have no warm up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink.