Quote

Be wary of security as a goal. It may often look like life's best prize. Usually it's not.

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
Life
Usually
Like
Security
Goal
Often
May
Best
Look
Wary
Looks
Prize

More quotes by William Zinsser

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You learn to write by writing.
William Zinsser
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A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
William Zinsser
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Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.
William Zinsser
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Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know-and what we don't know-about whatever we're trying to learn.
William Zinsser
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Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.
William Zinsser
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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
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Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.
William Zinsser
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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
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I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
William Zinsser
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A clear sentence is no accident.
William Zinsser
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There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.
William Zinsser
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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.
William Zinsser
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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
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Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with but. If that's what you learned, unlearn it - there's no stronger word at the start. It announces a total contrast with what has gone before, and the reader is thereby primed for the change.
William Zinsser
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Be grateful for every word you can cut.
William Zinsser
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What I want to do is to make people laugh so that they'll see things seriously.
William Zinsser
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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
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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.
William Zinsser
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Writing is thinking on paper.
William Zinsser
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Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.
William Zinsser