Best 139 quotes of William Zinsser on MyQuotes

A clear sentence is no accident.

All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

A writer is always working.

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.

Be grateful for every word you can cut.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.

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.

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.

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.

Editors are licensed to be curious.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Good writers are visible just behind their words.

Good writing is lean and confident.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.