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.

— E.B. White

E.B. White Quotes

The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change and we all instinctively avoid it.

— E.B. White

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

— E.B. White

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.

— E.B. White

I guess I remembered clearest of all the early mornings, when the lake was cool and motionless, remembered how the bedroom smelled of the lumber it was made of and of the wet woods whose scent entered through the screen.

— E.B. White

Wilbur didn’t want food, he wanted love.

— E.B. White

Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.

— E.B. White

By comparison with other less hectic days, the city is unconfortable and inconvenient; but New Yorkers tempramentally do not crave comfort and convenience – if they did they would live elsewhere.

— E.B. White

Good deeds never go unpunished.

— E.B. White

To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.

— E.B. White

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

— E.B. White

I can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat.

— E.B. White

A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user’s dreams than to express a precise meaning.

— E.B. White

A writer should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.

— E.B. White

Nauseous. Nauseated. The first means “sickening to contemplate”; the second means “sick at the stomach.” Do not, therefore, say “I feel nauseous,” unless you are sure you have that effect on others.

— E.B. White

In every queen there’s a touch of floozy.

— E.B. White

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.

— E.B. White

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.

— E.B. White

A breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that pops into his head is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day.

— E.B. White

The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.

— E.B. White

After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die.

— E.B. White
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