William Zinsser Quotes

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.

I had been sitting in Joan Countryman’s living room for two hours talking about mathematics. My pulse was steady, the hand that held my note-taking pencil didn’t shake and wasn’t even clammy. Where was that old math anxiety? I hadn’t been at any loss for questions; they came to me naturally. Like the process of writing, the process of asking questions had been a form of learning, raising further questions and telling me what I wanted to know next. I was genuinely curious. It never occurred to me that this was a subject I wasn’t supposed to be any good at. What did occur to me was that mathematics was not some arcane system of numbers; it was a language, a way of putting thoughts together. I might never master the language — my checkbook might still go unbalanced — but at least I had begun to glimpse what the language was trying to say and how it could help people to understand the world around them.

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.

the essence of writing is rewriting. Very few writers say on their first try exactly what they want

I don’t like to write, but I take great pleasure in having written — in having finally made an arrangement that has a certain inevitability, like the solution to a mathematical problem. Perhaps in no other line of work is delayed gratification so delayed.

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

Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to "personalize" the author.

The value of a baccalaureate education for nurses today,” said Professor Miller, “is that it helps them to become leaders and decision-makers and advocates. The caring role is critical, and often nurses are the only people in a community who are in a position to see what’s happening to a family when something goes wrong — for instance, when the child of two working parents gets sick — and to find a solution.

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

Writing is thinking on paper, or talking to someone on paper. If you can think clearly, or if you can talk to someone about the things you know and care about, you can write - with confidence and enjoyment.

all” is what we don’t want to hear. We only want to hear some. What made his trip different from everybody else’s? What can he tell us that we don’t already know? We don’t want him to describe every ride at Disneyland, or tell us that the Grand Canyon is awesome, or that Venice has canals. If one of the rides at Disneyland got stuck, if somebody fell into the awesome Grand Canyon, that would be worth hearing about.

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.

Remember this as a consolation in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do.

The writer, his eye on the finish line, never gave enough thought to how to run the race.

As George Orwell pointed out in “Politics and the English Language,” an essay written in 1946 but often cited during the wars in Cambodia, Vietnam and Iraq, “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. . . . Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.