In my later years I have sought to become simpler, straighter and purer in my handling of the language. I've had many writing hero...es, writers who have influenced me. Of the ones still alive, I can think of E.B. White. I certainly admire the pure, crystal stream of his prose. When I was very young as a sportswriter I knowingly and unashamedly imitated others. I had a series of heroes who would delight me for a while and I'd imitate them--Damon Runyon, Westbrook Pegler, Joe Williams.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist--nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writin...g away, can always fix himself up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man is not expected to love his country, lest he make an ass of himself. Yet our country, seen through the mists of smog, is cur...iously lovable, in somewhat the way an individual who has got himself into an unconscionable scrape seems lovable--or at least deserving of support.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his ent...ire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is at a fair that man can be drunk forever on liquor, love, or fights; at a fair that your front pocket can be picked by a trot...ting horse looking for sugar, and your hind pocket by a thief looking for his fortune.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The complaint ... about modern steel furniture, modern glass houses, modern red bars and modern streamlined trains and cars is tha...t all these objets modernes, while adequate and amusing in themselves, tend to make the people who use them look dated. It is an honest criticism. The human race has done nothing much about changing its own appearance to conform to the form and texture of its appurtenances.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all l...ife, all races and breeds into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive. At the feet of the tallest and plushest offices lie the crummiest slums. The genteel mysteries housed in the Riverside Church are only a few blocks from the voodoo charms of Harlem. The merchant princes, riding to Wall Street in their limousines down the East River Drive, pass within a few hundred yards of the gypsy kings; but the princes do not know they are passing the kings, and the kings are not up yet anyway--they live a more leisurely life than the princes and get drunk more consistently.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »