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Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.

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
Good
Stopped
Nobody
Reading
White
Ever
Writing

More quotes by William Zinsser

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If a good word already exists, there is no need to invent something painful.
William Zinsser
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A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
William Zinsser
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Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.
William Zinsser
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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
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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
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Writing is no respecter of blueprints.
William Zinsser
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I try to make what I have written tighter, stronger and more precise, eliminating every element that's not doing useful work. Then I go over it once more, reading it aloud, and am always amazed at how much clutter can still be cut.
William Zinsser
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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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Writing is linear and sequential Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z. The hard part of writing isn't the writing it's the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?
William Zinsser
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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
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Readers must be given room to bring their own emotions to a piece so crammed with emotional content the writer must tenaciously resist explaining why the material is so moving.
William Zinsser
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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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Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.
William Zinsser
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There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.
William Zinsser
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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.
William Zinsser
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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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One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
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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Never forget that you are practicing a craft with certain principles.
William Zinsser
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To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.
William Zinsser