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Never forget that you are practicing a craft with certain principles.

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
Craft
Crafts
Principles
Forget
Certain
Never
Practicing

More quotes by William Zinsser

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Dare to tell the smallest of stories if you want to generate large emotions.
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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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I have no interest in teaching writers how to sell. I want to teach them how to write. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself, and sales are likely to follow.
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Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.
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There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.
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The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.
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The sound of the bat is the music of spring training.
William Zinsser
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Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty. The sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and graceful boughs and frisky kittens and sleepy lagoons.
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My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.
William Zinsser
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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.
William Zinsser
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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.
William Zinsser
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A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
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Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a possible hernia.
William Zinsser
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Don't try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don't know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they're always looking for something new.
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Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.
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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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Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.
William Zinsser
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A writer is obviously at his most natural and relaxed when he writes in the first person. Writing is a personal transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and the transaction will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity.
William Zinsser
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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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The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
William Zinsser