Top 140 William Zinsser Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “All writers should strive to deliver something fresh-something editors or readers won’t know they want until they see it.”

— William Zinsser

104. “I try to make what I have written tighter, stronger and more precise, eliminating every element that’s not doing useful work. Then I go over it once more, reading it aloud, and am always amazed at how much clutter can still be cut.”

— William Zinsser

105. “But nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read.”

— William Zinsser

106. “I don’t like to write, but I take great pleasure in having written – in having finally made an arrangement that has a certain inevitability, like.”

— William Zinsser

107. “Writers can write to affirm and to celebrate, or they can write to debunk and destroy; the choice is ours.”

— William Zinsser

108. “Truth needs no adornment.”

— William Zinsser

109. “I have no interest in teaching writers how to sell. I want to teach them how to write. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself, and sales are likely to follow.”

— William Zinsser

110. “Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it’s beautiful? Simplify, simplify.”

— William Zinsser

111. “There’s almost no more beautiful sight than a simple declarative sentence.”

— William Zinsser

112. “You learn to write by writing. It’s a truism, but what makes it a truism is that it’s true. The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.”

— William Zinsser

113. “I like Catch-22, Gravity’s Rainbow and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, for instance, because the authors of those three surrealistic novels – Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon and Robert Pirsig – invented their own rules, knowing that the old ones wouldn’t do the job they had in mind.”

— William Zinsser

114. “Writing is an intimate transaction between two people, conducted on paper...”

— William Zinsser

115. “It wont do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it’s usually because the writer hasn’t be careful enough.”

— William Zinsser

116. “An idea can have value in itself, but its usefulness diminishes to the extent that you can’t articulate it to someone else.”

— William Zinsser

117. “Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy?”

— William Zinsser

118. “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. It’s a question of using the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest clarity and strength.”

— William Zinsser

119. “The adjective that exists solely as decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and a burden for the reader.”

— William Zinsser

120. “There are many good reasons for writing that have nothing to do with being published. Writing is a powerful search mechanism, and one of its satisfactions is that it allows you to come to terms with your life narrative. It also allows you to work through some of life’s hardest knocks – loss, grief, illness, addiction, disappointment, failure – and to find understanding and solace.”

— William Zinsser

121. “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.”

— William Zinsser

122. “The race in writing is not to the swift but to the original.”

— William Zinsser

123. “Writers are the custodians of memory...”

— William Zinsser

124. “Yet very few people realize how badly they write and how badly this hurts them and their career and their company. People are judged on the basis of who they appear to be in their writing, and if what they write is pompous or fuzzy or disorganized they will be perceived as all those things. Bad writing makes bright people look dumb.”

— William Zinsser

125. “But what if we fail’ they ask, whispering the dreaded word across the Generation Gap to their parents. ‘Don’t’ they whisper back. What they should say is ‘Don’t be afraid to fail. Failure isn’t fatal.”

— William Zinsser

126. “Don’t 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.”

— William Zinsser

127. “Nobody turns so quickly into a bore as a traveler home from his travels. He enjoyed his trip so much that he wants to tell us all about it – and “all” is what we don’t want to hear. We only want to hear some.”

— William Zinsser

128. “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.”

— William Zinsser

129. “When we say we like a writer’s style, what we mean is that we like his personality as he expresses it on paper. Given a choice between two traveling companions – and a writer is someone who asks us to travel with him – we usually choose the one who we think will make an effort to brighten the trip.”

— William Zinsser

130. “If a philosophical writer cannot be followed, the difficulty of his subject can be placed only in mitigation of his offense, not in condonation of it. There are too many expert witnesses on the other side.”

— William Zinsser

131. “I’ve singled out the humanities and the sciences because they are regarded as natural opposites, even natural enemies. But this is oversimplifying to make a point. Between English at one end of the spectrum and chemistry at the other are many subjects, like economics, that are a mystery to both camps.”

— William Zinsser

132. “Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it.”

— William Zinsser

133. “But on the question of who you’re writing for, don’t be eager to please.”

— William Zinsser

134. “Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without losing any information or losing the author’s voice.”

— William Zinsser

135. “There is no minimum length for a sentence that’s acceptable in the eyes of God.”

— William Zinsser

136. “Don’t annoy your readers by over-explaining – by telling them something they already know or can figure out.”

— William Zinsser

137. “Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.”

— William Zinsser

138. “A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time... If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.”

— William Zinsser

139. “You won’t write well until you understand that writing is an evolving process, not a finished product. Nobody expects you to get it right the first time, or even the second time.”

— William Zinsser

140. “The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds.”

— William Zinsser

141. “Rewriting is the essence of writing well:.”

— William Zinsser

142. “Vulnerability has a strength of its own.”

— William Zinsser

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

— William Zinsser

144. “I’m often dismayed by the sludge I see appearing on my screen if I approach writing as a task – the day’s work – and not with some enjoyment.”

— William Zinsser

145. “Writing is the handmaiden of leadership.”

— William Zinsser

146. “But narrative is the oldest and most compelling method of holding someone’s attention; everybody wants to be told a story.”

— William Zinsser

147. “Writing could get into corners that other teaching tools couldn’t reach.”

— William Zinsser