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Never hesitate to imitate another writer - every person learning a craft or an art needs models. Eventually you'll find your own voice and will shed the skin of the writer you imitated.
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
Needs
Writer
Imitate
Every
Learning
Craft
Never
Voice
Shed
Art
Crafts
Another
Eventually
Persons
Skin
Person
Skins
Imitated
Find
Models
Hesitate
More quotes by William Zinsser
Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
William Zinsser
Writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.
William Zinsser
Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
William Zinsser
The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.
William Zinsser
My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.
William Zinsser
Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.
William Zinsser
People read with their ears, whether they know it or not.
William Zinsser
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.
William Zinsser
Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
William Zinsser
A simple [writing] style is the result of very hard work.
William Zinsser
Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like enthralling and luminous.
William Zinsser
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.
William Zinsser
Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
William Zinsser
Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.
William Zinsser
Clear thinking becomes clear writing one can't exist without the other.
William Zinsser
Although the frankfurter originated in Frankfurt, Germany, we have long since made it our own, a twin pillar of democracy along with Mom's apple pie. In fact, now that Mom's apple pie comes frozen and baked by somebody who isn't Mom, the hot dog stands alone. What it symbolizes remains pure, even if what it contains does not.
William Zinsser
Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.
William Zinsser
Editors are licensed to be curious.
William Zinsser
Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.
William Zinsser
Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.
William Zinsser
