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The sound of the bat is the music of spring training.
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
Bats
Spring
Training
Sound
Music
More quotes by William Zinsser
Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
William Zinsser
Also bear in mind, when you're choosing your words and stringing them together, how they sound. This may seem absurd: readers read with their eyes. But in fact they hear what they are reading far more than you realize.
William Zinsser
Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.
William Zinsser
If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.
William Zinsser
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
To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.
William Zinsser
Never hesitate to imitate another writer. Imitation is part of the creative process for anyone learning an art or a craft. Bach and Picasso didn't spring full-blown as Bach or Picasso they needed models. This is especially true of writing.
William Zinsser
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
Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.
William Zinsser
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
Good writing is lean and confident.
William Zinsser
Thought is action in rehearsal.
William Zinsser
Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.
William Zinsser
A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
William Zinsser
A simple [writing] style is the result of very hard work.
William Zinsser
Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga.
William Zinsser
To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
William Zinsser
I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
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
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.
William Zinsser
