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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

More quotes by William Zinsser

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Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.
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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.
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A clear sentence is no accident.
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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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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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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.
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No one has something original or important to say will willing we run the risk of being misunderstood people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief
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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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Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly-about any subject at all.
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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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Writing is such lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up. If something strikes me as funny in the act of writing, I throw it in just to amuse myself. If I think it's funny I assume a few other people will find it funny, and that seems to me to be a good day's work.
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There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.
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Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it's where the game is won or lost. The idea is hard to accept. We all have emotional equity in our first draft we can't believe that it wasn't born perfect. But the odds are close to 100 percent that it wasn't.
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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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Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
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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.
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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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Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
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Writing is a craft not an art.
William Zinsser
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Good writers are visible just behind their words.
William Zinsser