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Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.

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
Surprisingly
Constantly
Writers
Asks
Often
Must
Trying

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A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
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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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Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a possible hernia.
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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.
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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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One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
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Good writers are visible just behind their words.
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If you lose the dullards back in the dust, that's where they belong. You don't want them anyway.
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Writing is a craft not an art.
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To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.
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Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind.
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Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
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Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
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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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Motivation clears the head faster than a nasal spray.
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Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like enthralling and luminous.
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You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: what does the reader need to know next?
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Writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.
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A simple [writing] style is the result of very hard work.
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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.
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