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

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
Trying
Outlandish
Humorists
Overnight
Routine
Becomes
Stills
Still
Today
Humorist

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The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.
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Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty. The sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and graceful boughs and frisky kittens and sleepy lagoons.
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Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.
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Not every oak has to be gnarled, every detective hard-bitten. The adjective that exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and an obstacle for the reader.
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Writing is thinking on paper.
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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.
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Writing is no respecter of blueprints.
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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.
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Editors are licensed to be curious.
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The sound of the bat is the music of spring training.
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All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.
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Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
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Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.
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Writers who think THEY are being criticized when only that writing is being criticized are beyond a teacher's reach. Writing can only be learned when a writer coldly separates himself from what he has written and looks at it with the objectivity of a plumber examining a newly piped bathroom to see if he got all the joints tight.
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Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
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A writer is always working.
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If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.
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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.
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People read with their ears, whether they know it or not.
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Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.
William Zinsser