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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
Dare
Large
Emotion
Tell
Stories
Generate
Smallest
Emotions
More quotes by William Zinsser
Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
William Zinsser
Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like enthralling and luminous.
William Zinsser
A simple [writing] style is the result of very hard work.
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
To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.
William Zinsser
Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.
William Zinsser
People read with their ears, whether they know it or not.
William Zinsser
Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.
William Zinsser
All writers should strive to deliver something fresh-something editors or readers won't know they want until they see it.
William Zinsser
Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.
William Zinsser
Editors are licensed to be curious.
William Zinsser
Writing is linear and sequential Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z. The hard part of writing isn't the writing it's the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?
William Zinsser
Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
William Zinsser
Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.
William Zinsser
The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.
William Zinsser
Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to personalize the author.
William Zinsser
A writer is always working.
William Zinsser
If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.
William Zinsser
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
Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.
William Zinsser
