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When you're ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point you want to make, look for the nearest exit.
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
Point
Facts
Look
Looks
Nearest
Made
Exit
Make
Presented
Ready
Stop
More quotes by William Zinsser
Writing is thinking on paper.
William Zinsser
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
All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.
William Zinsser
The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.
William Zinsser
If writing seems hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things people do.
William Zinsser
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
Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.
William Zinsser
There's no subject you don't have permission to write about. Students often avoid subjects close to their heart ... because they assume that their teachers will regard those topics as 'stupid.' No area of life is stupid to someone who takes it seriously. If you follow your affections you will write well and will engage your readers.
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
It's a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon launder became a dirty word.
William Zinsser
The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
William Zinsser
Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.
William Zinsser
Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident. . . . Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader's trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
William Zinsser
My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.
William Zinsser
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
Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
William Zinsser
Writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.
William Zinsser
Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.
William Zinsser
Good writers are visible just behind their words.
William Zinsser
Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.
William Zinsser
