William Zinsser Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by William Zinsser
William Zinsser Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from William Zinsser on Wise Famous Quotes.
I don't like to write, but I take great pleasure in having written - in having finally made an arrangement that has a certain inevitability, like
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.
And so, at last, I come to the one firm conviction that I mentioned at the beginning: it is that the subject is too new for final judgments.
Writers can write to affirm and to celebrate, or they can write to debunk and destroy; the choice is ours.
Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.
Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.
It's no fun to think about infinity and no cinche to write about it. Again, it helps to look for some human link.
Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.
Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.
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.
I don't want to give somebody my input and get his feedback, though I'd be glad to offer my ideas and hear what he thinks of them.
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.
If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.
The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.
Don't try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience - every reader is a different person.
Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like "enthralling" and "luminous."
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.
The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.
writing is a craft, not an art, and that the man who runs away from his craft because he lacks inspiration is fooling himself.
I almost always urge people to write in the first person ... Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.
Writers and learners will write better and learn more if they understand the "why" of what they are studying.
It requires writers to do two things that by their metabolism are impossible. They must relax, and they must have confidence.
writing is a sanity-saving companion for people in times of grief, loss, illness, and other accidents of fate.
Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.
You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: what does the reader need to know next?