Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
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
Artist
Solutions
Write
Dance
Another
Painting
Problem
Writer
Writing
Problems
Way
Talent
Head
Everybody
Piano
More quotes by William Zinsser
Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.
William Zinsser
Writing is hard work.
William Zinsser
Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like enthralling and luminous.
William Zinsser
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
Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
William Zinsser
Good writers are visible just behind their words.
William Zinsser
Thought is action in rehearsal.
William Zinsser
Writing is no respecter of blueprints.
William Zinsser
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
Be wary of security as a goal. It may often look like life's best prize. Usually it's not.
William Zinsser
Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I'd say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.
William Zinsser
I almost always urge people to write in the first person. ... Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.
William Zinsser
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
Not every oak has to be gnarled, every detective hard-bitten. The adjective that exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and an obstacle for the reader.
William Zinsser
The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
William Zinsser
I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
William Zinsser
A writer is always working.
William Zinsser
Writing is a craft not an art.
William Zinsser
Editors are licensed to be curious.
William Zinsser
There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.
William Zinsser
