William Zinsser Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

William Zinsser
Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.

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

William Zinsser
All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.

William Zinsser
Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Zinsser
We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

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

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

William Zinsser