William Zinsser Quotes
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My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.
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Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.
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Many writers are paralyzed by the thought that they are competing with everybody else who is trying to write and presumably doing it better.... Forget the competition and go at your own pace. Your only contest is with yourself.
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Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.
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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.
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Writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.
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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.
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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.
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If you lose the dullards back in the dust, that's where they belong. You don't want them anyway.
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Although the frankfurter originated in Frankfurt, Germany, we have long since made it our own, a twin pillar of democracy along with Mom's apple pie. In fact, now that Mom's apple pie comes frozen and baked by somebody who isn't Mom, the hot dog stands alone. What it symbolizes remains pure, even if what it contains does not.
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Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.
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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.
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Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.
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To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.
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But nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read.
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If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.
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Motivation clears the head faster than a nasal spray.
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I almost always urge people to write in the first person. ... Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.
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The sound of the bat is the music of spring training.
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Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.
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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.
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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.
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A writer is always working.
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Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
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Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a possible hernia.
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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.
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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.
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Writing is a craft not an art.
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Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.
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Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can't exist without the other.
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