Quote

Don't try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don't know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they're always looking for something new.

William Zinsser

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William Zinsser
Age: 92 †
Born: 1922
Born: October 7
Died: 2015
Died: May 12
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
New York City
New York
William Knowlton Zinsser
Thinking
Read
Besides
Country
Editors
Writing
Readers
Thing
Mood
Trying
Guess
Something
Reader
Always
Sort
Think
Looking
Publish

More quotes by William Zinsser

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I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
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The sound of the bat is the music of spring training.
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Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.
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Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.
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Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.
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Editors are licensed to be curious.
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When you're ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point you want to make, look for the nearest exit.
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Many writers are paralyzed by the thought that they are competing with everybody else who is trying to write and presumably doing it better.... Forget the competition and go at your own pace. Your only contest is with yourself.
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Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.
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Memoir isn't the summary of a life it's a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It's not it's a deliberate construction.
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Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
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You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: what does the reader need to know next?
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Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page...Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise.
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The game is won or lost on hundreds of small details.
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Good writers are visible just behind their words.
William Zinsser
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A simple [writing] style is the result of very hard work.
William Zinsser
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Although the frankfurter originated in Frankfurt, Germany, we have long since made it our own, a twin pillar of democracy along with Mom's apple pie. In fact, now that Mom's apple pie comes frozen and baked by somebody who isn't Mom, the hot dog stands alone. What it symbolizes remains pure, even if what it contains does not.
William Zinsser
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Thought is action in rehearsal.
William Zinsser
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Writing is such lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up. If something strikes me as funny in the act of writing, I throw it in just to amuse myself. If I think it's funny I assume a few other people will find it funny, and that seems to me to be a good day's work.
William Zinsser
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Never hesitate to imitate another writer. Imitation is part of the creative process for anyone learning an art or a craft. Bach and Picasso didn't spring full-blown as Bach or Picasso they needed models. This is especially true of writing.
William Zinsser