William Zinsser Quotes - Page 3

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Good writers are visible just behind their words.

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

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.

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.

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.

Writing is a craft not an art.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.