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.Collection: Believe
The game is won or lost on hundreds of small details.Collection: Games
Writing is thinking on paper.Collection: Writing
Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.Collection: Inspirational
Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people doCollection: Writing
Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.Collection: Reading
Dare to tell the smallest of stories if you want to generate large emotions.Collection: Stories
Writing is not a special language that belongs to a few sensitive souls who have a 'gift for words'. Writing is the logical arrangement of thought. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly---about any subject at all.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Lonely
The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.Collection: Writing
Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.Collection: Numbers
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.Collection: Writing
Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know-and what we don't know-about whatever we're trying to learn.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Moving
Don’t say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be tired. Be confused. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.Collection: Confused
To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.Collection: Writing
If writing seems hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things people do.Collection: Writing
Writing is linear and sequential; Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z. The hard part of writing isn't the writing; it's the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?Collection: Writing
There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.Collection: Soon Enough
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.Collection: Art
Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Proceed with confidence, generating it, if necessary, by pure willpower. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.Collection: Believe
Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.Collection: Writing
If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.Collection: Writing
Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.Collection: Want
If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.Collection: Fall
There's no sentence that's too short in the eyes of God.Collection: Inspirational
Writing is no respecter of blueprints.Collection: Writing
You learn to write by writing.Collection: Writing
Tips can make someone a better writer but not necessarily a good writer. That's a larger package - a matter of character. Golfing is more than keeping the left arm straight. Every good golfer is a complex engine that runs on ability, ego, determination, discipline, patience, confidence, and other qualities that are self-taught. So it is with writers and all creative artists. If their values are solid their work is likely to be solid.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Art
Memoir isn't the summary of a life; it's a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It's not; it's a deliberate construction.Collection: Events
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.Collection: Adjectives
Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind.Collection: Weed
If you would like to write better than everybody else, you have to want to write better than everybody else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you've written against the various middlemen - editors, agents and publishers - whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards not so high.Collection: Writing
You must find some way to elevate your act of writing into an entertainment. Usually this means giving the reader an enjoyable surprise. Any number of devices will do the job.... These seeming amusements in fact become your 'style.' When we say we like the style of certain writers, what we mean is that we like their personality as they express it on paper.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Art
Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.Collection: Toms
Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly-about any subject at all.Collection: Writing
A writer is always working.Collection: Writing
Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.Collection: Art
Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Teaching
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 mischiefCollection: Running
Thought is action in rehearsal.Collection: Positive
Writing is hard work.Collection: Hard Work
Writers are the custodians of memory, and that's what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.Collection: Memories
Good writing is lean and confident.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Believe
Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity.Collection: Moving
All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.Collection: Writing