Quote

Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.

William Zinsser

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Writing
Rewriting
Essence
Game
Games
Lost
Wells
Well

More quotes by William Zinsser

Image
Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.
William Zinsser
Image
The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn't induce him to continue to the third sentence, it's equally dead.
William Zinsser
Image
Writing is no respecter of blueprints.
William Zinsser
Image
Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
William Zinsser
Image
Never hesitate to imitate another writer - every person learning a craft or an art needs models. Eventually you'll find your own voice and will shed the skin of the writer you imitated.
William Zinsser
Image
Writing is hard work.
William Zinsser
Image
Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.
William Zinsser
Image
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.
William Zinsser
Image
Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind.
William Zinsser
Image
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.
William Zinsser
Image
Writers can write to affirm and to celebrate, or they can write to debunk and destroy the choice is ours.
William Zinsser
Image
Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like enthralling and luminous.
William Zinsser
Image
Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
William Zinsser
Image
Finding a voice that your readers will enjoy is largely a matter of taste. Saying that isn't much help-taste is a quality so intangible that it can't even be defined. But we know it when we meet it.
William Zinsser
Image
One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
William Zinsser
Image
The sound of the bat is the music of spring training.
William Zinsser
Image
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.
William Zinsser
Image
The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.
William Zinsser
Image
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
Image
Much of my writing has taken the form of a pilgrimage: to sacred places that represent the best of America, to musicians and other artists who represent the best of their art.
William Zinsser