Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.
To use many words to communicate few thoughts is everywhere the unmistakable sign of mediocrity. To gather much thought into few words stamps the man of genius.
The seeming significance of nature's appearances, their unchanging strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they awaken in the mind of man . . . If we could only write near enough to the facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transfer the glamour of reality direct upon our pages.
Every essay - the subject matter of every essay - is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.
In general I do not draw well with literary men -- not that I dislike them but I never know what to say to them after I have praised their last publication.
For Dicey, writing in 1885, and for me reading him some seventy years later, the rule of law still had a very English, or at least Anglo-Saxon, feel to it. It was later, through Hayek's masterpieces "The Constitution of Liberty" and "Law, Legislation and Liberty" that I really came to think this principle as having wider application.
The first law for the historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is true. Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality in his writing, or of malice.
All I needed was a steady table and a typewriter...a marble-topped bedroom washstand table made a good place; the dining-room table between meals was also suitable.