Quotes by William Zinsser

Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.

Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, its because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and youll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga.

I almost always urge people to write in the first person. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.

Less is more.

There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in their current of energy--Normal mailer, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, William F. Buckley, Jr., Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers--that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody thinks of the effort they made every morning to turn on the switch. You also have to turn on the switch. Nobody is going to do it for you.

Vulnerability has a strength of its own.

Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artists head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.

Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and its not a question of gimmicks to personalize the author. Its a question of using the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest clarity and strength.

Writing is such a lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up.

Im often dismayed by the sludge I see appearing on my screen if I approach writing as a task--the days work--and not with some enjoyment.

The writer, his eye on the finish line, never gave enough thought to how to run the race.

The final advantage is the same that applies in every other competitive venture. If you would like to write better than everyone else, you have to want to write better than everyone else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what youve written against the various middlemen--editors, agents, and publishers--whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards are not as high. Too many writers are browbeaten into settling for less than their best.

Dont annoy your readers by over-explaining--by telling them something they already know or can figure out. Try not to use words like surprisingly, predictably and of course, which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Trust your material.

Good writing is good writing, whatever form it takes and whatever we call it.

...being rather unique is no more possible than being rather pregnant.

Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty, and the sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and frisky kittens and hard-bitten detectives and sleepy lagoons. This is adjective-by-habit - a habit you should get rid of. Not every oak has to be gnarled. The adjective that exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and a burden for the reader.

Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty, and the sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and frisky kittens and hard-bitten detectives and sleepy lagoons. This is adjective-by-habit - a habit you should get rid of. Not every oak has to be gnarled. The adjective exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and a burden for the reader.

Mind in language are inseparable. If we violate our language we violate ourselves.

Even a poor translator couldnt kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.

Writers who think THEY are being criticized when only that writing is being criticized are beyond a teachers 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.