The crisis is not that the press is distrusted: the press has always been distrusted. The crisis is that this has finally dawned on the press.
Writing
If it had been your exact thought you would have used my exact words.
The ability to devise a good story has nothing in common with the ability to write tolerable prose.
The desires to have one’s work understood, and oneself understood, are nearly opposite, and ought not to share a verb.
To publish one’s work is to send a grown child out into the world: henceforth it will have to fend for itself.
The plagiarist, no matter what he says in public, never feels remorse. He regards himself as cheated out of his own thoughts and words by the sheer bad luck of someone else having written them first.
Our age, for all its weakness, reigns unchallenged in calumny and vitriol: no Mirabeaus, few Robespierres, and everywhere Marats.
A reader more intelligent than the writer will read more than the writer intended, a reader less intelligent will read less, and a reader equally intelligent will read something entirely different.
An aphorism should look wrong to half its readers and obvious to the other half.
To write, to attempt to bring a stranger to one’s view by words alone, shows the deepest faith in human nature: the confirmed skeptic becomes a devout missionary when he puts it on the page.
Biography is open to any writer who possesses industry without talent. If he also lacks industry, there is memoir.