A Quote by William Zinsser

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

Quote Topics

Act Admit Believe Believe In You Confidence Ego Energy Generating Going Identity Keep Might Necessary Opinions Own Proceed Pure Use Well Willpower Writing Your Yourself

Quote Author

William Zinsser
American - Writer
October 7, 1922 - May 12, 2015

Loving yourself is a willingness to be in the same space with your own creations. How contracted would you become if you try to withdraw from your own ideas? Loving yourself is not a matter of building your ego. Egotism is proving you are worthwhile after you have sunk into hating yourself. Loving yourself will dissolve your ego: you will feel no need to prove you are superior.

Thaddeus Golas

You have to be your own person. You can't let people's opinions determine how you think about yourself. There's a difference between identity and self-identity.

Amy Tan

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

I believe a real democracy can only flourish when you have your own nation state, your own identity, even your own flag you can rally around.

Geert Wilders

What I miss is being close to nature - collecting your own water and generating your own electricity, catching your own food. I still dream of doing that with my own family, even if it's just for a year-long experiment, I would love to have tried that.

Ben Fogle

'I am' is nothing but another name for the ego. Now you will be getting into trouble. If the ego is convinced that the only way is to drop the ego, then who is going to drop whom? And how? It will be like pulling yourself up by your own shoestrings. You will look just silly. Watch each word that you use. 'I am' is nothing but the ego.

Rajneesh

Think of the difference between a team sport and one that you do by yourself. Like it or not, if you're by yourself, you're going to be faced with a lot more of your own doubts and your own drawbacks and your own whatever.

Campbell Scott

The gender is irrelevant; the identity is the one you should try and create for yourself by yourself, and the narrative of your own life becomes your own book.

Genesis P-Orridge

Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities. Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy. But with self-confidence you can succeed. A sense of inferiority and inadequacy interferes with the attainment of your hopes, but self-confidence leads to self-realization and successful achievement.

Norman Vincent Peale

No human government has a right to enquire into private opinions, to presume that it knows them, or to act on that presumption. Men are the best judges of the consequences of their own opinions, and how far they are likely to influence their actions; and it is most unnatural and tyrannical to say, "as you think, so must you act. I will collect the evidence of your future conduct from what I know to be your opinions."

Charles James Fox

Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own question, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? ... Where does the proof use the hypothesis?

Paul Halmos

If you're really going to uncover something as an artist, you're going to come into access with parts of your personality and your psyche that are really uncomfortable to face: your own ambition, your own greed, your own avarice, your own jealousies, and anything that would get in the way of the purity of your own artistic voice.

Billy Corgan

There is another side [to ego] that can wreck a team or an organization. That is being distracted by your own importance. It can come from your insecurity in working with others. It can be the need to draw attention to yourself in the public arena. It can be a feeling that others are a threat to your own territory. These are all negative manifestations of ego, and if you are not alert to them, you get diverted and your work becomes diffused. Ego in these cases makes people insensitive to how they work with others and it ends up interfering with the real goal of any group efforts.

Bill Walsh

It's very important for any artist, in any field, to take their own temperature and check out their own energy, and see what it is they ought to be doing to keep the energy up. Because if your energy is not up, you're going to come up with some really dreary piece of work that no one's going to enjoy.

Steve Reich

People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself.