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One of the saddest sentences I know is I wish I had asked my mother about that. Or my father. Or my grandmother. Or my grandfather. As every parent knows, our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are.
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
Lives
Grandfather
Father
Fascinated
Mother
Grandmother
Children
Fascinating
Every
Sentences
Asked
Parent
Wish
Saddest
More quotes by William Zinsser
Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.
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If a good word already exists, there is no need to invent something painful.
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You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: what does the reader need to know next?
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Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.
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Writing is thinking on paper.
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Clear thinking becomes clear writing one can't exist without the other.
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Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind.
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Writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.
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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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The sound of the bat is the music of spring training.
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Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.
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Writing is hard work.
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Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I'd say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.
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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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Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to personalize the author.
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Writers who think THEY are being criticized when only that writing is being criticized are beyond a teacher's reach. Writing can only be learned when a writer coldly separates himself from what he has written and looks at it with the objectivity of a plumber examining a newly piped bathroom to see if he got all the joints tight.
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Thought is action in rehearsal.
William Zinsser
Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
William Zinsser
Never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation. Be yourself when you write. If you're not a person who says 'indeed' or 'moreover,' or who calls someone an individual ('he's a fine individual'), please don't write it.
William Zinsser
There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.
William Zinsser
