E. B. White Quotes

In my 20s, I just had to be the centre of attention all the time. I was quite eccentric.

I was a normal child. Which is to say, I was selfish and I was not entirely convinced of the existence of things that were not me, and I was certain, rock-solid, unshakeably certain, that I was the most important thing in creation. There was nothing that was more important to me than I was.

I was concerned about doing the right thing when I was a kid. I suppose as a child, you're a massive egomaniac, and you think that everything you do is going to affect the world.

We all get self-centered.

To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.

I have yet to find a man worth his salt in any direction who did not think of himself first and foremost.

Nobody really cares about what other people think anymore; they're all about themselves.

His fundamental interest throughout his life was himself.

The only one that matters is me. I am the only one that matters.

The funny thing about the people I don't like - they're very self-centered.

Of course there are other prima donnas around. So many of my colleagues, younger ones, are wonderful.

We humans are self-absorbed by nature, and spend most of our time focusing inwardly on our emotions, on our wounds, on our fantasies.

Egocentrism appears to us as a form of behavior intermediate between purely individual and socialized behavior.

It is a form of arrogance to assume that other people are even thinking about you.

In essence, Trump thinks everything should be about him, for him, for his benefit and glorification - and he can't comprehend, and doesn't care about, anything that isn't.

Boris Johnson has only ever cared about Boris Johnson.

You can't get too caught up in yourself.

He spares no resource in telling of his dead inventions... Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits infinitives and fills them up with adverbial stuffing. He presses the passing colloquialism into his service. His vast paragraphis sweat and struggle; the

In most writers, style is a welcome, an invitation, a letting down of the drawbridge between the artist and the world. Shaw had no time for such ruses. Unlike most of his countrymen, he abominated charm, which he regarded as evidence of chronic temperamental weakness.

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

Selfishness and self-absorption are deadly charm-exterminators.

An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.

Many people come into company full of what they intend to say in it themselves, without the least regard to others; and thus charged up to the muzzle are resolved to let it off at any rate.

The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

I try to find a style that matches the book. In the Baroque Cycle, I got infected with the prose style of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, which is my favorite era. It's recent enough that it is easy to read - easier than Elizabethan English - but it's pre-Victorian and so doesn't have the pomposity that is often a problem with 19th-century English prose. It is earthy and direct and frequently hilarious.