“Vulnerability has a strength of its own.”

“Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it's beautiful?...Simplify, simplify.”

“But on the question of who you're writing for, don't be eager to please.”

“Was the whole matter of aptitudes a myth – a copout used by people like me to avoid subjects that would force us to think inTherefore threatening ways?”

“Editors are licensed to be curious.”

“I never think of him as a scholar assaulting me with how much he knows, but as a teacher eager to share a lifelong passion for the subject.”

“It's no fun to think about infinity and no cinche to write about it. Again, it helps to look for some human link.”

“Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.”

“One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.”

“If a philosophical writer cannot be followed, the difficulty of his subject can be placed only in mitigation of his offense, not in condonation of it. There are too many expert witnesses on the other side.”

“Writers who think THEY are being criticized when only that writing is being criticized are beyond a teacher's reach. Writing can only be learned when a writer coldly separates himself from what he has written and looks at it with the objectivity of a plumber examining a newly piped bathroom to see if he got all the joints tight.”