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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
Art
Truth
Inventing
Memoir

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Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
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If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.
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Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.
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Writing is thinking on paper.
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Be wary of security as a goal. It may often look like life's best prize. Usually it's not.
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Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga.
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All writers should strive to deliver something fresh-something editors or readers won't know they want until they see it.
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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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A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
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Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.
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People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like.
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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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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.
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When you're ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point you want to make, look for the nearest exit.
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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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Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.
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