William Zinsser Quotes

Assume that you are the writer sitting down to write. You think your article must be of a certain length or it won’t seem important. You think how august it will look in print. You think of all the people who will read it. You think that it must have the solid weight of authority. You think that its style must dazzle. No wonder you tighten; you are so busy thinking of your awesome responsibility to the finished article that you can’t even start.

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

...writing is a craft, not an art, and that the man who runs away from his craft because he lacks inspiration is fooling himself.

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

Editors are licensed to be curious.

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

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.

Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper.

One of the words I railed against was “personality,” as in a “TV personality.” But now I wonder if it isn’t the only word for that vast swarm of people who are famous for being famous — and possibly nothing else. What did the Gabor sisters actually do?

Mind in language are inseparable. If we violate our language we violate ourselves.

Truth needs no adornment.

In visual reading, like verbal reading, the completeness of the reading relates directly to the quality of the reader’s stored information.

There is rather an unending night, as old as the sea itself. For most of its creatures, groping their way endlessly through its black waters, it must be a place of hunger, where food is scarce and hard to find, a shelterless place where there is no sanctuary from ever-present enemies, where one can only move on and on, from birth to death, through an endless night, confined as in a prison to his own particular layer of the sea.

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

Probably no subject is too hard if people take the trouble to think and write and read clearly. Maybe, in fact, it’s time to redefine the “three R’s” — they should be reading, ’riting and reasoning. Together they add up to learning. It’s by writing about a subject we’re trying to learn that we reason our way to what it means. Reasoning is a lost skill of the children of the TV generation, with their famously short attention span. Writing can help them get it back.