212 Quotes by William Zinsser

All your clear and pleasing sentences will fall apart if you don't keep remembering that writing is linear and sequential, that logic is the glue that holds it together, that tension must be maintained from one sentence to the next and from one paragraph to the next and from one section to the next, and that narrative - good old-fashioned storytelling - is what should pull your readers along without their noticing the tug.

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

A writer is obviously at his most natural and relaxed when he writes in the first person. Writing is a personal transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and the transaction will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity.

Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.

Writing is hard work.

All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.

Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.

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

If you lose the dullards back in the dust, that's where they belong. You don't want them anyway.