E. B. White on writing

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.

I wake each morning torn between the desire to improve the world and the desire to enjoy it. It makes it hard to plan the day.

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say and to finish without knowing what you have written.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau1712–1778

• Love

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

C. S. Lewis1898–1963

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin1706–1790

• Reading