Top 133 Quotes & Sayings by William Zinsser - Page 2

Never hesitate to imitate another writer. Imitation is part of the creative process for anyone learning an art or a craft. Bach and Picasso didn't spring full-blown as Bach or Picasso; they needed models. This is especially true of writing.

The game is won or lost on hundreds of small details.

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.

All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.

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

Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page...Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise.

Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.

Writing is hard work.

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

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.

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

Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.

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

The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to the education and rank.

Motivation clears the head faster than a nasal spray.

Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.

Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty. The sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and graceful boughs and frisky kittens and sleepy lagoons.

You'll never make your mark as a writer unless you develop a respect for words and a curiosity about their shades of meaning that is almost obsessive. The English language is rich in strong and supple words. Take the time to root around and find the ones you want

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

A writer is always working.

All your clear and pleasing sentences will fall apart if you don't keep remembering that writing is linear and sequential, that logic is the glue that holds it together, that tension must be maintained from one sentence to the next and from one paragraph to the next and from one section to the next, and that narrative - good old-fashioned storytelling - is what should pull your readers along without their noticing the tug.

Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.

Thought is action in rehearsal.

The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.

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

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.

Writers can write to affirm and to celebrate, or they can write to debunk and destroy; the choice is ours.

You must find some way to elevate your act of writing into an entertainment. Usually this means giving the reader an enjoyable surprise. Any number of devices will do the job.... These seeming amusements in fact become your 'style.' When we say we like the style of certain writers, what we mean is that we like their personality as they express it on paper.

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

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

Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.

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.

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.

Get people talking. Learn to ask questions that will elicit answers about what is most interesting or vivid in their lives. Nothing so animates writing as someone telling what he thinks or what he does - in his own words. His own words will always be better than your words, even if you are the most elegant stylist in the land.

If you would like to write better than everybody else, you have to want to write better than everybody else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you've written against the various middlemen - editors, agents and publishers - whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards not so high.

You learn to write by writing.

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.

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.

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

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

Editors are licensed to be curious.

Clutter is the disease of American writing.

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.

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

Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.

To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.

Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.

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.

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.

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.

Tips can make someone a better writer but not necessarily a good writer. That's a larger package - a matter of character. Golfing is more than keeping the left arm straight. Every good golfer is a complex engine that runs on ability, ego, determination, discipline, patience, confidence, and other qualities that are self-taught. So it is with writers and all creative artists. If their values are solid their work is likely to be solid.

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.

If you lose the dullards back in the dust, that's where they belong. You don't want them anyway.

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.

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

Good writers are visible just behind their words.

Good writing is lean and confident.

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

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

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