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If a good word already exists, there is no need to invent something painful.

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
Good
Invent
Exists
Painful
Already
Word
Need
Needs
Something

More quotes by William Zinsser

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Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.
William Zinsser
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One of the saddest sentences I know is I wish I had asked my mother about that. Or my father. Or my grandmother. Or my grandfather. As every parent knows, our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are.
William Zinsser
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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.
William Zinsser
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The game is won or lost on hundreds of small details.
William Zinsser
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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.
William Zinsser
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Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.
William Zinsser
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Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly-about any subject at all.
William Zinsser
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Noise is the typographical error and the poorly designed page...Ambiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise.
William Zinsser
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Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know-and what we don't know-about whatever we're trying to learn.
William Zinsser
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There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.
William Zinsser
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Clear thinking becomes clear writing one can't exist without the other.
William Zinsser
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Writing is hard work.
William Zinsser
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Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
William Zinsser
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Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like enthralling and luminous.
William Zinsser
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When you're ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point you want to make, look for the nearest exit.
William Zinsser
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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.
William Zinsser
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My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.
William Zinsser
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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
William Zinsser
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Dare to tell the smallest of stories if you want to generate large emotions.
William Zinsser
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I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
William Zinsser