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

— William Zinsser

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

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.

— William Zinsser

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

One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.

— William Zinsser

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

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 you've 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.

— William Zinsser

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

— William Zinsser

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 Edgers--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

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

— William Zinsser