William Zinsser Quotes:

Writing is thinking on paper.

source: - "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser, Introduction, (p. vii), 1976.

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Paper

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

source: - William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.9, Harper Collins

Topics: Writing, Hard Work, People, Hardest Thing, Third Time

I almost always urge people to write in the first person. ... Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.

Topics: Writing, People, Ego, Urges, First Person

Writing is a craft not an art.

Topics: Inspirational, Art, Writing

To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.

Topics: Writing, Alive

A clear sentence is no accident.

Topics: Writing, Clear, Sentences

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.

Topics: Jobs, People, Want, Old Job

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

Topics: Writing, Numbers, Way

Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.

Topics: Be Kind, Kind

Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.

source: - William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.5, Harper Collins

Topics: Subjects, Writing Well

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.

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Soul

Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can't exist without the other.

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Clear, Clear Thinking

A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.

Topics: Writing

I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.

Topics: Thinking, Fine Things, Ends, Prepositions

There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.

Topics: Enough, Said, Periods

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

source: - "Writing to Clients and Referring Professionals about Psychological Assessment". Book by J. B. Allyn (p. 164), 2012.

Topics: Writing, Simplicity, Humanity, Brevity

Good writers are visible just behind their words.

Topics: Writing, Behinds

If writing seems hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things people do.

Topics: Writing, People, Hardest

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

Topics: Reading, Writing, Easy

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.

Topics: Country, Writing, Thinking

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.

source: - William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.6, Harper Collins

Topics: Writing, Jargon, Disease, Frills, Strangling

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.

Topics: Believe, Writing, Emotional, Writing Well

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

Topics: Writing, Essence, Games

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.

Topics: Believe, Writing, Ego

The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components,

Topics: Writing, Secret, Good Writing, Long Words, Writing Well

Be grateful for every word you can cut.

Topics: Grateful, Writing, Cutting

Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.

source: - William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.12, Harper Collins

Topics: Writing, Ratios, Direct

There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.

Topics: Inspirational, Eye, Too Short

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.

Topics: Errors, Marketing, Vagueness, Redundancy

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.

Topics: Teacher, Writing, Thinking, Plumber

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

Topics: Needs, Painful, Good Words

Writing is no respecter of blueprints.

Topics: Writing, Blueprints

It is a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon, "launder" became a dirty word.

Topics: Dirty, Irony, Fitting

Dare to tell the smallest of stories if you want to generate large emotions.

source: - William Zinsser “The Writer Who Stayed”, Paul Dry Books

Topics: Want, Stories, Emotion

Motivation clears the head faster than a nasal spray.

Topics: Motivation, Faster, Spray

One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.

Topics: Writing, Shapes, Narrative

Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.

Topics: Interesting, Humanity, Ordinary, Ordinary Person

Editors are licensed to be curious.

Topics: Editors, Curious

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

Topics: Running, Writing, People, Being Misunderstood

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

Topics: Moving, Style, Narrative

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.

Topics: Fall, Writing, Sky, New You

Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist's head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.

Topics: Writing, Artist, Piano

All writers should strive to deliver something fresh-something editors or readers won't know they want until they see it.

Topics: Editors, Want, Strive

Although the frankfurter originated in Frankfurt, Germany, we have long since made it our own, a twin pillar of democracy along with Mom's apple pie. In fact, now that Mom's apple pie comes frozen and baked by somebody who isn't Mom, the hot dog stands alone. What it symbolizes remains pure, even if what it contains does not.

Topics: Mom, Dog, Apples, Frankfurt, Hot Dog

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

Topics: Mistake, Corporations, Language

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.

Topics: Art, Spring, Writing

People read with their ears, whether they know it or not,

Topics: People, Ears

Clutter is the disease of American writing,

Topics: Writing, Disease, Clutter

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.

Topics: Believe, Writing, Want

My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.

Topics: Writing, Simplicity, Humanity

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.

Topics: Writing, Voice, Musical, Condescension And, Condescension

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

Topics: Trying, Today, Routine

Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.

source: - William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.12, Harper Collins

Topics: Numbers, Paper, Purpose

Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.

Topics: Want, What You Want

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.

Topics: Writing, Voice, Quality

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

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Paper

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.

Topics: Writing, Stronger, Gone, Unlearn

Good writing is lean and confident.

Topics: Writing, Good Writing

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.

Topics: Reading, Cutting, Trying, Precise

Thought is action in rehearsal.

Topics: Thinking, Rehearsal, Action

You learn to write by writing.

Topics: Writing

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

Topics: Hard Work, Writing, Simple, Writing Style

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.

Topics: Teaching, Writing, Care

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

Topics: Strong, Roots, Curiosity, Supple

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

Topics: Language, Scholarship, Fury

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.

Topics: Writing, Want, Helping

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.

Topics: Moving, Emotional, Pieces

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.

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Trying

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.

Topics: Successful, Two, Mind

Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind,

Topics: Weed, Fighting, Clutter

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

Topics: Work, Laughing, People

Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga.

Topics: Memories, Writing, Thinking, Self Contained

Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Process

A writer is always working.

Topics: Writing

You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: what does the reader need to know next?

Topics: Writing, Doe, Needs

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?

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Doe

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.

Topics: Jobs, Writing, Mean

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

Topics: Games, Details, Small Details

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

Topics: Strong, Glory, Abraham

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.

Topics: Confused, Writing, Tired

Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.

Topics: Writing, Eye, Brain, Paragraph, Short Writing

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.

Topics: Lonely, Writing, Good Day

Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.

source: - William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.24, Harper Collins

Topics: Life, Writing, Trying

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

Topics: Trying, Knows, Asks

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.

Topics: Being Yourself, Writing, Say Anything

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.

source: - William Knowlton Zinsser (1980). “On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: Looks, Want, Facts

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.

Topics: Writing, Pride, Sight, Middlemen, Publishers

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.

Topics: Writing, Two, People

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

Topics: Reading, Writing, Today

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.

Topics: Important, Firsts, Reader

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

Topics: Principles, Crafts, Never Forget

If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.

source: - "On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction". Book by William Zinsser (Chapter 12 "Writing About Yourself: The Memoir," p. 98), 1976.

Topics: Writing, People, Want

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.

Topics: Teacher, Stupid, Writing

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.

source: - "On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction". Book by William Zinsser (Chapter 13 "Bits & Pieces," p. 136), 1976.

Topics: Writing, Men, Want

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.

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Talking

Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.

Topics: Anything Goes, World

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.

Topics: Fall, Writing, Together

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.

Topics: Writing, Mean, Essence, Writing Well

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.

Topics: Writing, Competition, Trying

If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.

source: - William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.18, Harper Collins

Topics: Fall, House, Nails

The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.

source: - "On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction". Book by William Zinsser (Chapter 21 "A Writers Decisions: Organizing a Long Article," p. 254), 1976.

Topics: Jobs, Arriving, Satisfaction

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.

source: - William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.35, Harper Collins

Topics: Reading, Eye, Mind

Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.

Topics: Being Yourself, Writing, Trying, Writing Well

Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.

source: - William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.17, Harper Collins

Topics: Writing, People, Style

Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.

Topics: Eloquence, Transactions, Invites

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.

Topics: Art, Writing, Editors, Imposing

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.

Topics: Memories, Custodians, Records

All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.

source: - "On Writing Well". Book by William Zinsser (Chapter 8: Unity, p. 49), 1976.

Topics: Writing, Problem, Writing Well

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.

source: - William Knowlton Zinsser (1980). “On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: Self, Adjectives, Detectives

Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.

source: - William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.18, Harper Collins

Topics: Toms

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

Topics: Dust, Want, Ifs

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

source: - "On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction". Book by William Zinsser (Chapter 13 "Bits & Pieces," p. 130), 1976.

Topics: Reading, Writing, White

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

source: - William Zinsser “The Writer Who Stayed”, Paul Dry Books

Topics: Writing, Choices, Celebrate

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.

source: - William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.5, Harper Collins

Topics: Reading, Writing, Next

Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.

source: - "On Writing Well". Book by William Zinsser (Chapter 9: Nonfiction as Literature, p. 61), 1976.

Topics: Writing, Firsts, Journalism

One of the saddest sentences I know is "I wish I had asked my mother about that." Or my father. Or my grandmother. Or my grandfather. As every parent knows, our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are.

Topics: Mother, Children, Father

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

Topics: Men, Relax, Hernias

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

source: - William Knowlton Zinsser (1990). “Spring Training”, Prentice Hall

Topics: Spring, Training, Sound, Spring Training

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

source: - William Knowlton Zinsser (1980). “On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: Who Cares, Care, Usage

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.

Topics: Running, Determination, Character, Good Writers, Self Taught

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.

source: - "On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction". Book by William Zinsser (Chapter 11 "Writing About Places: The Travel Article," p. 80), 1976.

Topics: People, Events, Want

It's a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon "launder" became a dirty word.

source: - "On Writing Well". Book by William Zinsser (Chapter 7: Usage, p. 47), 1976.

Topics: Sarcastic, Dirty, Sarcasm, Dirty Words

Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like "enthralling" and "luminous."

source: - William Knowlton Zinsser (1980). “On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: Space, Adjectives, Quiver

Be wary of security as a goal. It may often look like life's best prize. Usually it's not.

source: - William Zinsser (2005). “Writing about Your Life: A Journey Into the Past”, p.214, Da Capo Press

Topics: Goal, Looks, May

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

source: - William Zinsser (2012). “On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, p.3, Harper Collins

Topics: Lonely, Fun, Writing

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.

Topics: Events, Looks, Calling

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.

Topics: Art, Taken, Writing, Sacred Places

As a writer I try to operate within a framework of Christian principles, and the words that are important to me are religious words: witness, pilgrimage, intention.

Topics: Christian, Religious, Important

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.

Topics: Adjectives, Soil, Lagoons, Lush