"It doesn't satisfy me the way it is."

(Subject line = E.B. White on the first draft of Charlotte's Web. From the same letter: "I have put it away for a while to ripen (let the body heat go out of it).")

E.B. White's odd failure to produce other major works [besides Stuart Little, which took him from 1933 to 1949 to create, and Charlotte's Web] may, in part, be explained by a confession to one of his correspondents: "Unlike you, I have no faith, only a suitcaseful of beliefs that sustain me. Life's meaning has always eluded me, and I guess it always will. But I love it just the same."

- Selma G. Lanes, "E.B. White and Read All Over," a chapter in Through the Looking Glass: Further Adventures and Misadventures in the Realm of Children's Literature (2004)

Also quoted from White, in Lanes: "...the man-on-paper is always a more admirable character than his creator, who is a miserable creature of nose colds, minor compromises, and sudden flights into nobility."

And one more: "The rewards of such endeavor are not that I have acquired an audience as you suggest (fame of any kind being a Pyrrhic victory), but that sometimes in writing for myself - which is the only subject anyone knows intimately - I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure, an antic sound."