Writers who think THEY are being criticized when only that writing is being criticized are beyond a teacher's reach. Writing can only be learned when a writer coldly separates himself from what he has written and looks at it with the objectivity of a plumber examining a newly piped bathroom to see if he got all the joints tight. William Zinsser
The soul is healed by being with children.
-
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A wonderful gift may not be wrapped as you expect.
-
Jonathan Lockwood Huie
When someone is seeking, ” said Siddartha, “It happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he...
-
Hermann Hesse
Your words will either give you joy or give you sorrow, but if they were spoken without regret, they give you peace.
-
Shannon L. Alder
Just as some people may conceal their own sinfulness thus seeming better than the norm, others expose their own sinfulness thus seeming worse than the norm.
-
Criss Jami
More Quotes By William Zinsser
Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience–every reader is a different person.
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...
I almost always urge people to write in the first person. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.
Less is more.
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...
