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Dare to tell the smallest of stories if you want to generate large emotions.

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
Smallest
Emotions
Dare
Large
Emotion
Tell
Stories
Generate

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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.
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What I want to do is to make people laugh so that they'll see things seriously.
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Also bear in mind, when you're choosing your words and stringing them together, how they sound. This may seem absurd: readers read with their eyes. But in fact they hear what they are reading far more than you realize.
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To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.
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Writers are the custodians of memory, and that's what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.
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Clutter is the disease of American writing.
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The best way to learn to write is to study the work of the men and women who are doing the kind of writing you want to do.
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Clear thinking becomes clear writing one can't exist without the other.
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Many writers are paralyzed by the thought that they are competing with everybody else who is trying to write and presumably doing it better.... Forget the competition and go at your own pace. Your only contest is with yourself.
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Writing is hard work.
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Writers can write to affirm and to celebrate, or they can write to debunk and destroy the choice is ours.
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Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a possible hernia.
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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 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.
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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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Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.
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A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
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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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The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.
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I have no interest in teaching writers how to sell. I want to teach them how to write. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself, and sales are likely to follow.
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