People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like.

Less is more.

Writing is thinking on paper.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

When you're ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point you want to make, look for the nearest exit.

I almost always urge people to write in the first person. ... Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.

Thought is action in rehearsal.

A clear sentence is no accident.

If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.

There is no where that life problem can take you that God's presence cannot reach you. There is nothing that people can do to you that can keep God from getting to you.

Miss Bingley's congratulations to her brother, on his approaching marriage, were all that was affectionate and insincere.

Patience is the blue vitriol to control the fungal emotions of life

I think I have a pugnacious style. My style is not pretty. I don't use words like "amber" or "opaque."

I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.

I claim to know my millions. All the hours of the day I am with them. They are my first care and God that is to be found in the hearts of the dumb millions.

I think we're just going to have to live with the microcosm in the electronic world of the kind of things that we might see in the physical world.

No movement can afford to be caught in a time warp and exist in a state of suspended animation.

Unfortunately there was one thing that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetency, and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency.

Greatness is great power, producing great effects. It is not enough that a man has great power in himself, he must shew it to all the world in a way that cannot be hid or gainsaid.