Quote

Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.

William Zinsser

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Becomes
Even
Wolfe
Overnight
Toms
Nobody

More quotes by William Zinsser

Image
Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.
William Zinsser
Image
If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.
William Zinsser
Image
Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
William Zinsser
Image
Get people talking. Learn to ask questions that will elicit answers about what is most interesting or vivid in their lives. Nothing so animates writing as someone telling what he thinks or what he does - in his own words. His own words will always be better than your words, even if you are the most elegant stylist in the land.
William Zinsser
Image
Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist's head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.
William Zinsser
Image
Thought is action in rehearsal.
William Zinsser
Image
Dare to tell the smallest of stories if you want to generate large emotions.
William Zinsser
Image
Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.
William Zinsser
Image
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.
William Zinsser
Image
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
William Zinsser
Image
All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.
William Zinsser
Image
Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.
William Zinsser
Image
Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.
William Zinsser
Image
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.
William Zinsser
Image
The game is won or lost on hundreds of small details.
William Zinsser
Image
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.
William Zinsser
Image
Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like enthralling and luminous.
William Zinsser
Image
There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to say is the right method for you.
William Zinsser
Image
There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.
William Zinsser
Image
The sound of the bat is the music of spring training.
William Zinsser