William Zinsser Quotes

American writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, and professor

William Knowlton Zinsser (born October 7, 1922 – May 12, 2015 ) was an American writer, editor, literary critic, and teacher. He began his career as a journalist for the New York Herald Tribune, where he worked as a feature writer, drama editor, film critic, and editorial writer, and has been a longtime contributor to leading magazines.

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Alternative Names: William Knowlton Zinsser

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As baggage I would be taking along a number of strong opinions on why so many Americans don’t learn to write and why they live in so much fear of trying. One of them has to do with English teachers. Under the American system, they are the people who teach our children to write. If they don’t, nobody will. They do it with dedication, and I hope they’ll be rewarded, if not here on earth, at least in heaven, for there’s almost no pedagogical task harder and more tiring than teaching somebody to write. But there are all kinds of reasons why English teachers ought to get some relief. One is that they shouldn’t have to assume the whole responsibility for imparting a skill that’s basic to every area of life. That should be everybody’s job. That’s citizenship.

The adjective that exists solely as decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and a burden for the reader.

My work has been the education I avoided.

Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.

Yet very few people realize how badly they write and how badly this hurts them and their career and their company. People are judged on the basis of who they appear to be in their writing, and if what they write is pompous or fuzzy or disorganized they will be perceived as all those things. Bad writing makes bright people look dumb.

It's no fun to think about infinity and no cinche to write about it. Again, it helps to look for some human link.

H. L. Mencken said that “0.8 percent of the human race is capable of writing something that is instantly understandable.” He may have been a little high.

One man’s romantic sunrise is another man’s hangover.

As a writer you must keep a tight rein on your subjective self — the traveler touched by new sights and sounds and smells — and keep an objective eye on the reader.

I thought of how often the act of writing even the simplest document — a letter, for instance — had clarified my half-formed ideas. Writing and thinking and learning were the same process.

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

It was also a method of getting students to learn who were afraid of learning.

Pure nonsense is a joy forever, as Keats didn't quite say. I love to see a writer flying high, just for the hell of it.

But narrative is the oldest and most compelling method of holding someone’s attention; everybody wants to be told a story.

Writing could get into corners that other teaching tools couldn’t reach.