X

Sort by

Quote length

Sentiment

Change font

Change background

William Zinsser Inspirational Quotes (127)

Page 2 of 6
Filter & Style
Image
Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.
William Zinsser
Image
A clear sentence is no accident.
William Zinsser
Image
Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Proceed with confidence, generating it, if necessary, by pure willpower. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.
William Zinsser
Image
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.
William Zinsser
Image
Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like enthralling and luminous.
William Zinsser
Image
As a writer I try to operate within a framework of Christian principles, and the words that are important to me are religious words: witness, pilgrimage, intention.
William Zinsser
Image
Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.
William Zinsser
Image
Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.
William Zinsser
Image
If you lose the dullards back in the dust, that's where they belong. You don't want them anyway.
William Zinsser
Image
Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
William Zinsser
Image
Much of my writing has taken the form of a pilgrimage: to sacred places that represent the best of America, to musicians and other artists who represent the best of their art.
William Zinsser
Image
Writing is hard work.
William Zinsser
Image
Never forget that you are practicing a craft with certain principles.
William Zinsser
Image
Never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation. Be yourself when you write. If you're not a person who says 'indeed' or 'moreover,' or who calls someone an individual ('he's a fine individual'), please don't write it.
William Zinsser
Image
People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like.
William Zinsser
Image
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.
William Zinsser
Image
Dare to tell the smallest of stories if you want to generate large emotions.
William Zinsser
Image
The best way to learn to write is to study the work of the men and women who are doing the kind of writing you want to do.
William Zinsser
Image
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.
William Zinsser
Image
The sound of the bat is the music of spring training.
William Zinsser
Image
Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.
William Zinsser
Image
The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.
William Zinsser
Image
Writers are the custodians of memory, and that's what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.
William Zinsser
Image
Editors are licensed to be curious.
William Zinsser
Previous
Next