"Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do."

"Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there."

"We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon."

"It's a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon "launder" became a dirty word."

"The best way to learn to write is to study the work of the men and women who are doing the kind of writing you want to do."

"Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe."

"Writing is thinking on paper, or talking to someone on paper. If you can think clearly, or if you can talk to someone about the things you know and care about, you can write - with confidence and enjoyment."

"This is a book by a writer who does some teaching, not a book by a teacher who does some writing, and one of the satisfactions of the craft is that there's always something new to learn."

"Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to "personalize" the author."

"Pure nonsense is a joy forever, as Keats didn't quite say. I love to see a writer flying high, just for the hell of it."

"The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction."

"The frontier that remains is is the interior one, the most forbidding and mysterious frontier."

"Historians often do not mention the truly important features of daily life, like games, concentrating instead on tedious political maneuvering."

"Our culture is teleological-it presumes purposive development and a conclusion."

"A great nation's foreign policy involves power, money, trade, oil and arms, but it proeeds from ideas."

"The truth is that history constantly presents new problems in the guise of old."

"The achievement of nationhood is a product not only of time and circumstance but usually of war and suffering as well."

"Foreign policy deals across time as well as space."

"One cannot say that it will never happen again, or that it cannot happen."

"These choices by small countries are vital for them, but may be more momentous than commonly understood for others as well, including the major powers, who presumptuously believe they are in control of events."

"It is one of the perceptual defects of Western government and press to assign Western-style motives to what people do in non-Western societies, as if these are universally relevant."

"The problems of elites is an old one for which Americans have found no solid answer."

"The moral spectacle of capitalism still offends, as does American capitalism's implacable insistence that the market determine value even in the political, intellectual, and artistic spheres."

"We Americans really seem to be the only truly non-socialist economy on earth."

"For four hundred years European civilization has dominated the world - for better or for worse. It is convenient, and flattering, for Americans to assume that this is all over; but it very rash to do so."

"Europeans believe in democracy - or, at least, in republican government - but they have considered the alternatives, and continue to do so, and that scandalizes Americans."

"But Americans are different from everyone else in the world - except the Canadians, and Americans are more different from the Canadians than they often think."

"The accounts that history presents have to be paid. Past has to be reconciled with present in the life of a nation. History is an insistent force: the past is what put us where we are. the past cannot be put behind until it is settled with."

"The center holds; passion falls away. That is what happened ideologically in Western Europe over recent years."

"America's problem is how to free itself from the grip of it's exhausted ideas."

"When walking, you see things that you miss in a motor car or on the train. You give your mind space to ponder"

"It is a common myth that idlers are incapable of working. The term “idler” is used as a pejorative by the forces of dullness and authority as they like the idea that idleness equates to evil, and they want society at large to despise the idler. The non-idler cannot understand the paradox of the working idler. He likes things to be simple: you are either working, or not working."

"Another characteristic of the idler's work is that it looks suspiciously like play. This, again, makes the non-idler feel uncomfortable. Victims of the Protestant work ethic would like all work to be unpleasant. They feel that work is a curse, that we must suffer on this earth to earn our place in the next. The idler, on the other hand, sees no reason not to use his brain to organise a life for himself where his play is his work, and so attempt to create his own little paradise in the here and now."

"The reason laziness is rarely pushed as a lifestyle option is down to one simple reason: money. There are fortunes to be made out of active lifestyles. Gyms charge fees. But no one is going to make money out of sleep. It is free"

"All of our technology is completely unnecessary to a happy life"

"We really seek intelligence not for the answers it may suggest to the problems of life, but because we believe it is life,—not for aid in making the will of God prevail, but because we believe it is the will of God. We love it, as we love virtue, for its own sake, and we believe it is only virtue’s other and more precise name."

"But the lover of intelligence must be patient with those who cannot readily share his passion. Some pangs the mind will inflict upon the heart. It is a mistake to think that men are united by elemental affections. Our affections divide us. We strike roots in immediate time and space, and fall in love with our locality, the customs and the language in which we were brought up. Intelligence unites us with mankind, by leading us in sympathy to other times, other places, other customs; but first the prejudiced roots of affection must be pulled up. These are the old pangs of intelligence, which still comes to set a man at variance against his father, saying, “He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me.”"

"The disposition to consider intelligence a peril is an old Anglo-Saxon inheritance. Our ancestors have celebrated this disposition in verse and prose. Splendid as our literature is, it has not voiced all the aspirations of humanity, nor could it be expected to voice an aspiration that has not characteristically belonged to the English race; the praise of intelligence is not one of its characteristic glories. “Be good, sweet maid, and let who will he clever.” [Charles Kingsley, “A Farewell”] Here is the startling alternative which to the English, alone among great nations, has been not startling but a matter of course. Here is the casual assumption that a choice must be made between goodness and intelligence; that stupidity is first cousin to moral conduct, and cleverness the first step into mischief; that reason and God are not on good terms with each other; that the mind and the heart are rival buckets in the well of truth, inexorably balanced—full mind, starved heart—stout heart, weak head."

"If a wise man should ask, What are the modern virtues? and should answer his own question by a summary of the things we admire; if he should discard as irrelevant the ideals which by tradition we profess, but which are not found outside of the tradition or the profession—ideals like meekness, humility, the renunciation of this world; if he should include only those excellences to which our hearts are daily given, and by which our conduct is motived,—in such an inventory what virtues would he name?"

"Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms."

"By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world."

"Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style."

"Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to."

"Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence."

"Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life."

"It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries."

"We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful."

"We don't exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand, while to be surrounded by friends is constantly to have our identity confirmed; their knowledge and care for us have the power to pull us from our numbness. In small comments, many of them teasing, they reveal they know our foibles and except them and so, in turn, accept that we have a place in the world."