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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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As a writer I try to operate within a framework of Christian principles, and the words that are important to me are religious words: witness, pilgrimage, intention.
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You learn to write by writing.
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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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There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.
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Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.
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Never hesitate to imitate another writer. Imitation is part of the creative process for anyone learning an art or a craft. Bach and Picasso didn't spring full-blown as Bach or Picasso they needed models. This is especially true of writing.
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Writing is not a special language that belongs to a few sensitive souls who have a 'gift for words'. Writing is the logical arrangement of thought. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly---about any subject at all.
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Writers are the custodians of memory, and that's what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.
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Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.
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The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
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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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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 no respecter of blueprints.
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Good writing is lean and confident.
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Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
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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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Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
William Zinsser
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Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
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Every time you look at a blank piece of paper, you're doing something new. You have to step onto that blank territory and remind yourself the sky didn't fall in the last time you wrote. Writing is a question of overcoming your fears-and everybody has them.
William Zinsser
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If writing seems hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things people do.
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