A biography for E. B. Whitehasn’t been written yet.
“A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.”
“Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.”
“Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor.”
“The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man's adjustment to it, the speed of his acceptance.”
“I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.”
“I can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat.”
“There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.”
“English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.”
“Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.”
“The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.”
“The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change and we all instinctively avoid it.”
“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.”
“Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.”
“Old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself - a lad of about 19.”
“Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.”
“Be obscure clearly.”
“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.”