For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. A meteor makes a striking effect for a moment. You look up and cry 'There!' and it is gone fore…

A man of intellect is like an artist who gives a concert without any help from anyone else, playing on a single instrument - a piano, say, which is a little or…

Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies.

Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

Americans don't like plain talk anymore. Nowadays they like fat talk. Show them a lean, plain word that cuts to the bone and watch them lard it with thick grea…