William Zinsser Quotes About Writing
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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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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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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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If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.
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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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Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.
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A writer is always working.
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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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Writing is a craft not an art.
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Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can't exist without the other.
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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.
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Writing is thinking on paper.
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The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.
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Writing is no respecter of blueprints.
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Be grateful for every word you can cut.
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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.
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Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.
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Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.
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Writers who think THEY are being criticized when only that writing is being criticized are beyond a teacher's reach. Writing can only be learned when a writer coldly separates himself from what he has written and looks at it with the objectivity of a plumber examining a newly piped bathroom to see if he got all the joints tight.
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A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
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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.
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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.
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Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
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