Top 100 Zinsser's Quotes
#1. I took William Zinsser's advice that you write to yourself and you hope that there are people out there who are like you.
Donald Miller
#2. I don't read a lot of inspirational books for life. But for writing, I think the two best books are The War of Art and William Zinsser's On Writing Well. I read a lot of classics;
Donald Miller
#3. 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
#4. One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
William Zinsser
#6. 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
#7. Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.
William Zinsser
#8. The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn't induce him to continue to the third sentence, it's equally dead.
William Zinsser
#9. To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.
William Zinsser
#10. 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
#11. If writing seems hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things people do.
William Zinsser
#12. It requires writers to do two things that by their metabolism are impossible. They must relax, and they must have confidence.
William Zinsser
#13. There is no minimum length for a sentence that's acceptable in the eyes of God.
William Zinsser
#14. Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.
William Zinsser
#15. Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with "but." If that's what you learned, unlearn it - there's no stronger word at the start. It announces a total contrast with what has gone before, and the reader is thereby primed for the change.
William Zinsser
#16. Writers and learners will write better and learn more if they understand the "why" of what they are studying.
William Zinsser
#18. 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.
William Zinsser
#19. 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
#20. Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.
William Zinsser
#21. 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.
William Zinsser
#22. Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.
William Zinsser
#23. Every writing project must be reduced before you start to write.
William Zinsser
#24. writing is a sanity-saving companion for people in times of grief, loss, illness, and other accidents of fate.
William Zinsser
#25. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Proceed with confidence, generating it, if necessary, by pure willpower. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.
William Zinsser
#26. Never forget that you are practicing a craft with certain principles.
William Zinsser
#27. 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
#28. I try to make what I have written tighter, stronger and more precise, eliminating every element that's not doing useful work. Then I go over it once more, reading it aloud, and am always amazed at how much clutter can still be cut.
William Zinsser
#29. Be wary of security as a goal. It may often look like life's best prize. Usually it's not.
William Zinsser
#30. Never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation. Be yourself when you write. If you're not a person who says 'indeed' or 'moreover,' or who calls someone an individual ('he's a fine individual'), please don't write it.
William Zinsser
#31. It's no fun to think about infinity and no cinche to write about it. Again, it helps to look for some human link.
William Zinsser
#32. Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like "enthralling" and "luminous."
William Zinsser
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.
William Zinsser
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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.
William Zinsser
#39. There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.
William Zinsser
#40. A writer is obviously at his most natural and relaxed when he writes in the first person. Writing is a personal transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and the transaction will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity.
William Zinsser
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
William Zinsser
#44. 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.
William Zinsser
#45. Writers can write to affirm and to celebrate, or they can write to debunk and destroy; the choice is ours.
William Zinsser
#46. 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.
William Zinsser
#47. Writing is such a lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up.
William Zinsser
#48. 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
#49. If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.
William Zinsser
#50. 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
#53. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. As a nonfiction writer you must get on the plane. If the subject interests you, go after it, even if it's in the next county or the next state or the next country. It's not going to come looking for you. Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.--William Zinsser
Meg Lukens Noonan
#60. Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.
William Zinsser
#61. Writing can be taught or learned in the vacuum. We must say to students in every area of knowledge: "This is a how other people have written about this subject. Read it; study it; think about it. You can do it too.
William Zinsser
#62. 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
#63. ...being "rather unique" is no more possible than being rather pregnant.
William Zinsser
#64. Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident ... Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader's trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
William Zinsser
#65. But however secure and well-regulated civilized life may become, bacteria, Protozoa, viruses, infected fleas, lice, ticks, mosquitoes, and bedbugs will always lurk in the shadows ready to pounce when neglect, poverty, famine, or war lets down the defenses.
Hans Zinsser
#67. Every time you look at a blank piece of paper, you're doing something new. You have to step onto that blank territory and remind yourself the sky didn't fall in the last time you wrote. Writing is a question of overcoming your fears-and everybody has them.
William Zinsser
#69. If you lose the dullards back in the dust, that's where they belong. You don't want them anyway.
William Zinsser
#70. Mind in language are inseparable. If we violate our language we violate ourselves.
William Zinsser
#71. All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.
William Zinsser
#72. Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.
William Zinsser
#74. People read with their ears, whether they know it or not,
William Zinsser
#75. We write to find out what we know and what we want to say.
William Zinsser
#76. The best advice on writing I've ever received was from William Zinsser: 'Be grateful for every word you can cut.'
Christopher Buckley
#77. 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
#78. writing is a craft, not an art, and that the man who runs away from his craft because he lacks inspiration is fooling himself.
William Zinsser
#80. 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
#82. Nobody told all the new computer writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they're writing fluently doesn't mean they're writing well.
William Zinsser
#83. 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
#84. Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
William Zinsser
#85. Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.
William Zinsser
#86. But on the question of who you're writing for, don't be eager to please.
William Zinsser
#87. If a good word already exists, there is no need to invent something painful.
William Zinsser
#88. Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know-and what we don't know-about whatever we're trying to learn.
William Zinsser
#89. The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.
William Zinsser
#91. A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
William Zinsser
#93. Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.
William Zinsser
#94. 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
#95. The writer, his eye on the finish line, never gave enough thought to how to run the race.
William Zinsser
#96. Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I'd say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.
William Zinsser
#97. 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
#98. 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.
William Zinsser
#99. Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind,
William Zinsser
#100. 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
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