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A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.

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
Avoid
Writer
Anything
Writing

More quotes by William Zinsser

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Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.
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Writing is a craft not an art.
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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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Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.
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No one has something original or important to say will willing we run the risk of being misunderstood people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief
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Be wary of security as a goal. It may often look like life's best prize. Usually it's not.
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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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The game is won or lost on hundreds of small details.
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Writing is hard work.
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Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
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Writing is linear and sequential Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z. The hard part of writing isn't the writing it's the thinking. 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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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.
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Editors are licensed to be curious.
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A writer is always working.
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All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.
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Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do
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Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.
William Zinsser
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If you lose the dullards back in the dust, that's where they belong. You don't want them anyway.
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Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.
William Zinsser
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A clear sentence is no accident.
William Zinsser