E. B. White Quotes (1899-1985)

“Television will enormously enlarge the eye's range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.”

“If a man is in health, he doesn't need to take anybody else's temperature to know where he is going.”

“Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.”

“Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.”

“Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable.”

“Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society.”

“A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring”

“A great deal of writing is not "plotted"—most of my essays have no plot structure, they are a ramble in the woods, or a ramble in the basement of my mind.”

“I am a member of a party of one, and I live in an age of fear. Nothing lately has unsettled my party and raised my fears so much as your editorial, on Thanksgiving Day, suggesting that employees should be required to state their beliefs in order to hold their jobs. The idea is inconsistent with our constitutional theory and has been stubbornly opposed by watchful men since the early days of the Republic.”

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

“I was deeply impressed by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. It may well be the book by which the human race will stand or fall.”

“The New Yorker had an interest in publishing any writer that could turn in a good piece. It read everything submitted. Hemingway, Faulkner, and the others were well established and well paid when The New Yorker came on the scene. The magazine would have been glad to publish them, but it didn’t have the money to pay them off, and for the most part they didn’t submit. They were selling to The Saturday Evening Post and other well-heeled publications, and in general were not inclined to contribute to the small, new, impecunious weekly. Also, some of them, I would guess, did not feel sympathetic to The New Yorker’s frivolity. Ross had no great urge to publish the big names; he was far more interested in turning up new and yet undiscovered talent, the Helen Hokinsons and the James Thurbers. We did publish some things by Wolfe—“Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” was one. I believe we published something by Fitzgerald. But Ross didn’t waste much time trying to corral “emerged” writers. He was looking for the ones that were found by turning over a stone.”