Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
William Zinsser
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Bold
Kind
More quotes by William Zinsser
A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
William Zinsser
What I want to do is to make people laugh so that they'll see things seriously.
William Zinsser
The sound of the bat is the music of spring training.
William Zinsser
Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
William Zinsser
To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
William Zinsser
Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.
William Zinsser
Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it's where the game is won or lost. The idea is hard to accept. We all have emotional equity in our first draft we can't believe that it wasn't born perfect. But the odds are close to 100 percent that it wasn't.
William Zinsser
Writing is thinking on paper.
William Zinsser
Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.
William Zinsser
Clutter is the disease of American writing.
William Zinsser
Writing is not a special language that belongs to a few sensitive souls who have a 'gift for words'. Writing is the logical arrangement of thought. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly---about any subject at all.
William Zinsser
Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
William Zinsser
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.
William Zinsser
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
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
All writers should strive to deliver something fresh-something editors or readers won't know they want until they see it.
William Zinsser
Clear thinking becomes clear writing one can't exist without the other.
William Zinsser
I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
William Zinsser
A writer is obviously at his most natural and relaxed when he writes in the first person. Writing is a personal transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and the transaction will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity.
William Zinsser
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