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Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind.

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
Always
Weeds
Like
Clutter
Slightly
Weed
Behinds
Behind
Writer
Fighting

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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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Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like enthralling and luminous.
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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.
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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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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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Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.
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Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Proceed with confidence, generating it, if necessary, by pure willpower. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.
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Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist's head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.
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One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
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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.
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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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Motivation clears the head faster than a nasal spray.
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Get people talking. Learn to ask questions that will elicit answers about what is most interesting or vivid in their lives. Nothing so animates writing as someone telling what he thinks or what he does - in his own words. His own words will always be better than your words, even if you are the most elegant stylist in the land.
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Good writers are visible just behind their words.
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Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.
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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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Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.
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Writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.
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Editors are licensed to be curious.
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There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.
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