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

More quotes by William Zinsser

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Memoir isn't the summary of a life it's a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It's not it's a deliberate construction.
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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.
William Zinsser
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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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There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to say is the right method for you.
William Zinsser
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It's a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon launder became a dirty word.
William Zinsser
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Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident. . . . Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader's trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
William Zinsser
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Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.
William Zinsser
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Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.
William Zinsser
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Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
William Zinsser
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To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
William Zinsser
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A clear sentence is no accident.
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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Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.
William Zinsser
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Don’t say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be tired. Be confused. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.
William Zinsser
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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.
William Zinsser
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Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.
William Zinsser
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I almost always urge people to write in the first person. ... Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.
William Zinsser
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Writing is a craft not an art.
William Zinsser
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There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.
William Zinsser
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My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.
William Zinsser