Top 100 William Zinsser Quotes
#1. We write to find out what we know and what we want to say.
William Zinsser
#2. People read with their ears, whether they know it or not,
William Zinsser
#4. Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.
William Zinsser
#5. All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.
William Zinsser
#6. Mind in language are inseparable. If we violate our language we violate ourselves.
William Zinsser
#7. If you lose the dullards back in the dust, that's where they belong. You don't want them anyway.
William Zinsser
#8. It's a memoir of various events in my own life, but it's also a teaching book: along the way I explain the writing decisions I made. They are the same decisions that confront every writer going in search of his or her past: matters of selection, reduction, organization and tone.
William Zinsser
#9. Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.
William Zinsser
#10. Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy?
William Zinsser
#11. Also bear in mind, when you're choosing your words and stringing them together, how they sound. This may seem absurd: readers read with their eyes. But in fact they hear what they are reading far more than you realize.
William Zinsser
#12. 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.
William Zinsser
#13. I'm often dismayed by the sludge I see appearing on my screen if I approach writing as a task--the day's work--and not with some enjoyment.
William Zinsser
#15. 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.
William Zinsser
#16. When you're ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point you want to make, look for the nearest exit.
William Zinsser
#17. Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind,
William Zinsser
#18. Every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn't have before. Not two thoughts, or five - just one. So decide what single point you want to leave in the reader's mind.
William Zinsser
#19. Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.
William Zinsser
#21. A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
William Zinsser
#23. Don't annoy your readers by over-explaining--by telling them something they already know or can figure out. Try not to use words like "surprisingly," "predictably" and "of course," which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Trust your material.
William Zinsser
#24. If a good word already exists, there is no need to invent something painful.
William Zinsser
#25. But on the question of who you're writing for, don't be eager to please.
William Zinsser
#26. Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
William Zinsser
#27. The constant desire to win is a very American kind of trouble. Less glamorous gains made along the way--learning, wisdom, growth, and confidence, dealing with failure--aren't given the same respect because they can't be given a grade.
William Zinsser
#28. I almost always urge people to write in the first person ... Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.
William Zinsser
#30. The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.
William Zinsser
#31. One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
William Zinsser
#32. Never forget that you are practicing a craft with certain principles.
William Zinsser
#33. writing is a sanity-saving companion for people in times of grief, loss, illness, and other accidents of fate.
William Zinsser
#34. Every writing project must be reduced before you start to write.
William Zinsser
#35. Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.
William Zinsser
#36. Never hesitate to imitate another writer - every person learning a craft or an art needs models. Eventually you'll find your own voice and will shed the skin of the writer you imitated.
William Zinsser
#38. Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.
William Zinsser
#39. There is no minimum length for a sentence that's acceptable in the eyes of God.
William Zinsser
#40. It wont do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it's usually because the writer hasn't be careful enough.
William Zinsser
#41. Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.
William Zinsser
#42. I never think of him as a scholar assaulting me with how much he knows, but as a teacher eager to share a lifelong passion for the subject.
William Zinsser
#43. I like Catch-22, Gravity's Rainbow and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, for instance, because the authors of those three surrealistic novels - Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon and Robert Pirsig - invented their own rules, knowing that the old ones wouldn't do the job they had in mind.
William Zinsser
#44. Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to "personalize" the author.
William Zinsser
#45. Nobody told all the new e-mail writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they are writing with ease and enjoyment doesn't mean they are writing well.
William Zinsser
#46. Writing is such a lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up.
William Zinsser
#47. Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
William Zinsser
#49. I use "perpetrated" because it's the kind of word that passive-voice writers are fond of. They prefer long words of Latin origin to short Anglo-Saxon words - which compounds their trouble and makes their sentences still more glutinous. Short is better than long. Of the 701 words in
William Zinsser
#50. Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.
William Zinsser
#51. I don't like to write, but I take great pleasure in having written - in having finally made an arrangement that has a certain inevitability, like
William Zinsser
#52. Most nonfiction writers have a definitiveness complex. They feel that they are under some obligation - to the subject, to their honor, to the gods of writing - to make their article the last word. It's a commendable impulse, but there is no last word.
William Zinsser
#53. If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.
William Zinsser
#54. Don't say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be tired. Be confused. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.
William Zinsser
#55. The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.
William Zinsser
#56. But what if we fail' they ask, whispering the dreaded word across the Generation Gap to their parents. 'Don't' they whisper back. What they should say is 'Don't be afraid to fail. Failure isn't fatal
William Zinsser
#57. The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds.
William Zinsser
#58. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: what does the reader need to know next?
William Zinsser
#59. Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.
William Zinsser
#60. If a philosophical writer cannot be followed, the difficulty of his subject can be placed only in mitigation of his offense, not in condonation of it. There are too many expert witnesses on the other side.
William Zinsser
#61. Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.
William Zinsser
#62. Don't try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don't know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they're always looking for something new.
William Zinsser
#63. As a writer you must keep a tight rein on your subjective self - the traveler touched by new sights and sounds and smells - and keep an objective eye on the reader.
William Zinsser
#64. Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.
William Zinsser
#65. The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.
William Zinsser
#66. One of the saddest sentences I know is "I wish I had asked my mother about that." Or my father. Or my grandmother. Or my grandfather. As every parent knows, our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are.
William Zinsser
#67. Be true to yourself and to the culture you were born into. Tell your story as only you can.
William Zinsser
#69. A simple [writing] style is the result of very hard work.
William Zinsser
#70. The best way to learn to write is to study the work of the men and women who are doing the kind of writing you want to do.
William Zinsser
#71. Dare to tell the smallest of stories if you want to generate large emotions.
William Zinsser
#72. Memoir isn't the summary of a life; it's a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It's not; it's a deliberate construction.
William Zinsser
#73. Writing is such lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up. If something strikes me as funny in the act of writing, I throw it in just to amuse myself. If I think it's funny I assume a few other people will find it funny, and that seems to me to be a good day's work.
William Zinsser
#74. Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do
William Zinsser
#75. It is a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon, "launder" became a dirty word.
William Zinsser
#76. Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.
William Zinsser
#77. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, assessing a Polish crisis in 1984, said: "There's continuing ground for serious concern and the situation remains serious. The longer it remains serious, the more ground there is for serious concern.
William Zinsser
#78. 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.
William Zinsser
#79. Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly can write clearly, about anything at all.
William Zinsser
#80. All writers should strive to deliver something fresh-something editors or readers won't know they want until they see it.
William Zinsser
#81. What I want to do is to make people laugh so that they'll see things seriously.
William Zinsser
#82. I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
William Zinsser
#83. Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
William Zinsser
#85. Writing is not a special language that belongs to a few sensitive souls who have a 'gift for words'. Writing is the logical arrangement of thought. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly
about any subject at all.
William Zinsser
#86. Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.
William Zinsser
#87. Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like "enthralling" and "luminous."
William Zinsser
#88. And so, at last, I come to the one firm conviction that I mentioned at the beginning: it is that the subject is too new for final judgments.
William Zinsser
#89. One of the words I railed against was "personality," as in a "TV personality." But now I wonder if it isn't the only word for that vast swarm of people who are famous for being famous - and possibly nothing else. What did the Gabor sisters actually do?
William Zinsser
#90. Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.
William Zinsser
#91. Good writing is good writing, whatever form it takes and whatever we call it.
William Zinsser
#92. Don't try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience - every reader is a different person.
William Zinsser
#93. My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.
William Zinsser
#95. Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.
William Zinsser
#96. Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a possible hernia.
William Zinsser
#97. It is possible that the artists are sane and the world they are painting is crazy.
William Zinsser
#99. Be wary of security as a goal. It may often look like life's best prize. Usually it's not.
William Zinsser
#100. Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga.
William Zinsser
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