My quarrel with poets… is not that they are unclear, but that they are too diligent. Diligence in a poet is the same as dishonesty in a bookkeeper. There are rafts of bards who are writing too much, too diligently, and too slyly.
E.B. White Quotes
The world likes humor, but it treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with brussels sprouts.
I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village – the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up!
New York is nothing like Paris; it is nothing like London; and it is not Spokane multiplied by sixty, or Detroit multiplied by four. It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression. The Empire Stare Building […]
It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfil him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.
On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.
New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience – if they did they would live elsewhere.
The city is like poetry: it compresses all life into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.
An intelligence service is, in fact, a stupidity service.
