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Readers must be given room to bring their own emotions to a piece so crammed with emotional content the writer must tenaciously resist explaining why the material is so moving.
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
Emotion
Piece
Tenaciously
Bring
Materials
Crammed
Moving
Reader
Explaining
Given
Emotional
Resist
Must
Room
Readers
Writer
Content
Pieces
Emotions
Rooms
Material
More quotes by William Zinsser
Be wary of security as a goal. It may often look like life's best prize. Usually it's not.
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Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.
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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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Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.
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If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.
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There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.
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
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
You learn to write by writing.
William Zinsser
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.
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Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
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Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.
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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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Writing is hard work.
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The game is won or lost on hundreds of small details.
William Zinsser
Never forget that you are practicing a craft with certain principles.
William Zinsser
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
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
Motivation clears the head faster than a nasal spray.
William Zinsser
All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.
William Zinsser
