William Zinsser Quotes

Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist's head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.

Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.

Editors are licensed to be curious.

Dare to tell the smallest of stories if you want to generate large emotions.

Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.

Readers must be given room to bring their own emotions to a piece so crammed with emotional content; the writer must tenaciously resist explaining why the material is so moving.

My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.

Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.

The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.

Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.

Be grateful for every word you can cut.

Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.

Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly-about any subject at all.

Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.

Writing is hard work.

Writers are the custodians of memory, and that's what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.

Good writing is lean and confident.

A writer is always working.

I have no interest in teaching writers how to sell. I want to teach them how to write. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself, and sales are likely to follow.

No one has something original or important to say will willing we run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief

Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.

Never forget that you are practicing a craft with certain principles.

Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.

If a good word already exists, there is no need to invent something painful.

Not every oak has to be gnarled, every detective hard-bitten. The adjective that exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and an obstacle for the reader.

Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a possible hernia.

Much of my writing has taken the form of a pilgrimage: to sacred places that represent the best of America, to musicians and other artists who represent the best of their art.

The sound of the bat is the music of spring training.

People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like.

Writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.

Motivation clears the head faster than a nasal spray.

Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.

Finding a voice that your readers will enjoy is largely a matter of taste. Saying that isn't much help-taste is a quality so intangible that it can't even be defined. But we know it when we meet it.

What I want to do is to make people laugh so that they'll see things seriously.

A simple [writing] style is the result of very hard work.

There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.

Writing is no respecter of blueprints.

Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind.

Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.

Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.

Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.

Be wary of security as a goal. It may often look like life's best prize. Usually it's not.

Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like "enthralling" and "luminous."

As a writer I try to operate within a framework of Christian principles, and the words that are important to me are religious words: witness, pilgrimage, intention.

You learn to write by writing.

The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.

Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.

I almost always urge people to write in the first person. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.

Vulnerability has a strength of its own.

Writing is such a lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up.