William Zinsser Quotes

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.

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

Thought is action in rehearsal.

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

All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.

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

Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

You learn to write by writing.

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

Motivation clears the head faster than a nasal spray.

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.

Clutter is the disease of American writing.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.