William Zinsser Quotes

we have become a society fearful of revealing who we are.

There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in their current of energy — Normal mailer, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, William F. Buckley, Jr., Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers — that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody thinks of the effort they made every morning to turn on the switch. You also have to turn on the switch. Nobody is going to do it for you.

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

had learned by long travail a far from obvious lesson: Readers must be given room to bring their own emotions to a piece so crammed with emotional content; the writer must tenaciously resist explaining why the material is so moving.)

Writing is learned by imitation. I learned to write mainly by reading writers who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and by trying to figure out how they did it. S. J. Perelman told me that when he was starting out he could have been arrested for imitating Ring Lardner. Woody Allen could have been arrested for imitating S. J. Perelman. And who hasn’t tried to imitate Woody Allen? Students often feel guilty about modeling their writing on someone else’s writing. They think it’s unethical — which is commendable. Or they’re afraid they’ll lose their own identity. The point, however, is that we eventually move beyond our models; we take what we need and then we shed those skins and become who we are supposed to become.

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

Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it's beautiful?...Simplify, simplify.

Information is your sacred product, and noise is its pollutant. Guard the message with your life.

writing is primarily an exercise in logic and that words are just tools designed to do a specific job.

It wont do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it's usually because the writer hasn't been careful enough

Most men and women lead lives, if not of quiet desperation, at least of desperate quietness, and they jump at a chance to talk about their work to an outsider who seems eager to listen.

Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, assessing a Polish crisis in 1984, said: “There’s continuing ground for serious concern and the situation remains serious. The longer it remains serious, the more ground there is for serious concern.

the self who emerges on paper is far stiffer than the person who sat down to write.

And so, at last, I come to the one firm conviction that I mentioned at the beginning: it is that the subject is too new for final judgments.

The constant desire to win is a very American kind of trouble. Less glamorous gains made along the way — learning, wisdom, growth, and confidence, dealing with failure — aren't given the same respect because they can't be given a grade.