William Zinsser Quotes

Myself’ is the refuge of idiots taught early that ‘me’ is a dirty word.

But on the question of who you're writing for, don't be eager to please.

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

Clichés are the enemy of taste.

"But apart from these lazinesses of logic, what makes the story so tired is the failure of the writer to reach for anything but the nearest cliche'. "Shouldered his way," "only to be met," "crashing into his face," "waging a lonely war," "corruption that is rife," "sending shock waves," "New York's finest," - these dreary phrases constitute writing at its most banal. We know just what to expect. No surprise awaits us in the form of an unusual word, an oblique look. We are in the hands of a hack, and we know it right away, We stop reading."

Editors are licensed to be curious.

We have no king to establish the King’s English; we only have the President’s English, which we don’t want.

Nouns now turn overnight into verbs. We target goals and we access facts. Train conductors announce that the train won’t platform. A sign on an airport door tells me that the door is alarmed. Companies are downsizing. It’s part of an ongoing effort to grow the business. “Ongoing” is a jargon word whose main use is to raise morale. We face our daily job with more zest if the boss tells us it’s an ongoing project; we give more willingly to institutions if they have targeted our funds for ongoing needs. Otherwise we might fall prey to disincentivization.

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.

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

There’s almost no more beautiful sight than a simple declarative sentence.

Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other. It’s

Truth needs no adornment.

Writing is the handmaiden of leadership.

I like Catch-22, Gravity’s Rainbow and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, for instance, because the authors of those three surrealistic novels — Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon and Robert Pirsig — invented their own rules, knowing that the old ones wouldn’t do the job they had in mind.