Top 140 William Zinsser Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.”

— William Zinsser

52. “Every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn’t have before. Not two thoughts, or five – just one. So decide what single point you want to leave in the reader’s mind.”

— William Zinsser

53. “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

54. “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

55. “Writing is no respecter of blueprints.”

— William Zinsser

56. “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

57. “The sound of the bat is the music of spring training.”

— William Zinsser

58. “All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.”

— William Zinsser

59. “There’s not much to be said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.”

— William Zinsser

60. “The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.”

— William Zinsser

61. “Finding a voice that your readers will enjoy is largely a matter of taste. Saying that isn’t much help-taste is a quality so intangible that it can’t even be defined. But we know it when we meet it.”

— William Zinsser

62. “Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.”

— William Zinsser

63. “Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge.”

— William Zinsser

64. “Not every oak has to be gnarled, every detective hard-bitten. The adjective that exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and an obstacle for the reader.”

— William Zinsser

65. “No one has something original or important to say will willing we run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.”

— William Zinsser

66. “Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.”

— William Zinsser

67. “Motivation clears the head faster than a nasal spray.”

— William Zinsser

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

— William Zinsser

69. “Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic’s quiver – words like “enthralling” and “luminous.””

— William Zinsser

70. “Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.”

— William Zinsser

71. “Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.”

— William Zinsser

72. “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

73. “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

74. “The best way to learn to write is to study the work of the men and women who are doing the kind of writing you want to do.”

— William Zinsser

75. “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

76. “What I want to do is to make people laugh so that they’ll see things seriously.”

— William Zinsser

77. “Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn’t be there.”

— William Zinsser

78. “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

79. “It is a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon, “launder” became a dirty word.”

— William Zinsser

80. “Nobody told all the new e-mail writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they are writing with ease and enjoyment doesn’t mean they are writing well.”

— William Zinsser

81. “Writing wasn’t easy and wasn’t fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.”

— William Zinsser

82. “Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a possible hernia.”

— William Zinsser

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

— William Zinsser

84. “Don’t try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they’re always looking for something new.”

— William Zinsser

85. “Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.”

— William Zinsser

86. “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

87. “The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead.”

— William Zinsser

88. “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

89. “Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with “but.” If that’s what you learned, unlearn it – there’s no stronger word at the start. It announces a total contrast with what has gone before, and the reader is thereby primed for the change.”

— William Zinsser

90. “Editors are licensed to be curious.”

— William Zinsser

91. “Good writers are visible just behind their words.”

— William Zinsser

92. “Never forget that you are practicing a craft with certain principles.”

— William Zinsser

93. “Even a poor translator couldn’t kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.”

— William Zinsser

94. “If a good word already exists, there is no need to invent something painful.”

— William Zinsser

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

— William Zinsser

96. “Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.”

— William Zinsser

97. “Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it’s still outlandish.”

— William Zinsser

98. “Much of my writing has taken the form of a pilgrimage: to sacred places that represent the best of America, to musicians and other artists who represent the best of their art.”

— William Zinsser

99. “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

100. “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