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I have no interest in teaching writers how to sell. I want to teach them how to write. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself, and sales are likely to follow.

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
Teach
Sell
Interest
Sells
Sound
Product
Process
Likely
Write
Writers
Care
Products
Take
Follow
Writing
Teaching
Sales

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Don’t say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be tired. Be confused. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.
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The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.
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Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.
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If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.
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The sound of the bat is the music of spring training.
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Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.
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Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
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I almost always urge people to write in the first person. ... Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.
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Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
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All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.
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Also bear in mind, when you're choosing your words and stringing them together, how they sound. This may seem absurd: readers read with their eyes. But in fact they hear what they are reading far more than you realize.
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Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
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A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
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Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly-about any subject at all.
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If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.
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Clear thinking becomes clear writing one can't exist without the other.
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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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I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
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A writer is always working.
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There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.
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