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unearths some literary gems.
From Letters of E. B. White:
***The only Earp I ever knew was neither Wyatt nor Henry--he was Fred Earp, a copyreader on the Seattle Times. All this is getting us nowhere, all this Earp business. It earps me. I suspect it earps you, too.***I am no editor even with a small E....I can't edit the side of a barn.***I doubt if you are the most original writer living, but I doubt whether anybody is.***Plays, as you [Thurber] pointed out, come about as close to literature as a problem in solid geometry.***I finally quit thinking about book titles when I arrived at one called The Pop-Up Book for Sit-Down People.***I don't know what I think about it, but it occurred to me--or rather, it occurred to my wife, who is the person in this family to whom things occur.***Sorry to learn that Dr. Canby is revolted by spiders. Probably he doesn't meet the right spiders.***I encountered an otter once in a lake in Nova Scotia and it is the only animal in the world that really looks as though it had been designed by you [Thurber].***I don't want you to try to adapt "The Door" for a TV show. I am a fellow who likes to leave well enough alone, and I'm not even convinced that "The Door" is well enough.***[On revising Elements of Style]The first two sections of the "Composition" chapter sustained the heaviest attack; I felt that they were narrow and bewildering. (In their new form they are merely bewildering.)***Thanks for your friendly note about my gold medal. It is too big to wear and too small to roll like a hoop.***The spider in the book is not prettified in any way, she is merely endowed with more talent than usual. This natural Charlotte was accepted at face value, and I came out ahead because of not trying to patronize an arachnid.***[White quotes a correspondent]"Morris Bishop gave one of the finest addresses I've ever heard--in a beautiful English with every sentence turned out just right."[Says White]I like to think of those sentences turned out just right, in their little hats set jauntily on one side and their starchy shirt-fronts immaculate.***Thanks for letting me see the sketch for the cover. It fulfills a life-time dream of mine: to hold a pencil behind my ear. I've never been able to do it, as my ear sticks out too far.***Whenever anybody in America finds something on his desk or in his shelves that he wants to get rid of, he sends it to me.***I can still see Miss Holland's face when she walked into my office and handed me a check for several thousand dollars--as though she had just laid an egg. [It seems to me we've had a lot of this metaphorical egg laying lately, from various authors!]***[On the word "parameter," whose widespread use White is criticizing.]I am enclosing a recent letter from Jacques Cousteau, an underwater stylist. Jacques has been "quantifying the horizontal and vertical distribution of nutrients and sediment in the Amazon," and, as you see, he finally wound up with a mouthful of parameters. They probably slipped through his face mask.***[From a jocular proposed self-blurb for his biography.]The best in-depth study ever made of an out-of-his-depth man.***Scott [White's biographer] simply became infatuated with the sound of his own research.***
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