Top 133 Quotes & Sayings by William Zinsser
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer William Zinsser.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
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.
My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.
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.
Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
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.
Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
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.
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.
The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.
Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.
If writing seems hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things people do.
Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
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.
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.
Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
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.
My commodity as a writer, whatever I'm writing about, is me. And your commodity is you. Don't alter your voice to fit the subject. Develop one voice that readers will recognize when they hear it on the page, a voice that's enjoyable not only in its musical line but in its avoidance of sounds that would cheapen its tone: breeziness and condescension and clichés.
Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.
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.
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.
Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.
Dare to tell the smallest of stories if you want to generate large emotions.
Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.
Writing is thinking on paper.
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.
A clear sentence is no accident.
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.
Writing is a craft not an art.
To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.
If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.
Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.
People read with their ears, whether they know it or not.
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.
Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.
There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.
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.
There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to say is the right method for you.
A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
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.
I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.
Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.
Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it's where the game is won or lost. The idea is hard to accept. We all have emotional equity in our first draft; we can't believe that it wasn't born perfect. But the odds are close to 100 percent that it wasn't.
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.
Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can't exist without the other.
All writers should strive to deliver something fresh-something editors or readers won't know they want until they see it.
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.
Writing is linear and sequential; Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z. The hard part of writing isn't the writing; it's the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?
Be grateful for every word you can cut.
There's no subject you don't have permission to write about. Students often avoid subjects close to their heart ... because they assume that their teachers will regard those topics as 'stupid.' No area of life is stupid to someone who takes it seriously. If you follow your affections you will write well and will engage your readers.
Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.
If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.
I almost always urge people to write in the first person. ... Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.
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
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.
The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: what does the reader need to know next?
Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.
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