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Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.

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
Inventing
Memoir
Art
Truth

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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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Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.
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Good writing is lean and confident.
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But nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read.
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Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.
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Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
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Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.
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A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
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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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Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind.
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Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.
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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.
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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.
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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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Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.
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There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.
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A simple [writing] style is the result of very hard work.
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Writing is thinking on paper.
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Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.
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Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.
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