William Zinsser Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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My dad was a football player - a soccer player - for Manchester United, and I loved playing football, but I also happened to be the guy in class who was pretty good at sight reading. My teacher gave me scripts, and I was very comfortable.
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There's something different that happens when you're writing a song for your own record that you know you're going to sing.
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Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.
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When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it.
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I can sit and analyze everything and beat myself up and say you don't quite sing as good as you used to, you're writing better songs maybe than you used to, but to me it's just the journey.
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I love writing. Given a choice, after directing for all these years, and if given an army of talented directors, I would not direct at all.
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The ego being shattered is not what frightens me - that can be useful for writing - but the ego being inflated is sort of like it dying of gout.
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I didn't necessarily have a total idea when I was writing the movie of where everything was going. I just wanted to have really realistic dialogue and write like people I knew talked. I tried to keep it very real.
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I never have written a movie, but there are some bad movies out there. I can make one. I definitely want to get into that because that's how you, at my level, would get a lead in a movie - by writing a low budget thing for myself. So I gotta get to it.
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In tennis it's easy to get greedy - and one Grand Slam doesn't feel enough any more.
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If I've learned anything in my career, it's that nothing worthwhile in life comes easy. That's just the way it is.
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Comics is still my first love. But I always did other kinds of writing, too, so I think of myself as a writer first.
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All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.
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I think the beauty of the writing of 'Game of Thrones' is not that the characters are fearless; it's how they overcome their fear, you know?
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The problem with too beautiful a view is that it's alright for the mulling stage. But for the writing stage, you want to be somewhere without a view, especially if it is very different from what you're writing.
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All good writing comes out of aloneness.
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I don't think I will ever write about politics or foreign policy. I feel like there is so much good writing in those areas that I have little to add. I also like to steer clear of writing about people whom I do not personally like.
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I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
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No self-respecting feminist could argue with the claim that the novel is more likely to accept existing power structures than not. But there's a vast difference, surely, between Dickens saying Indians should be exterminated and a Dave Eggers writing eloquently about the NSA, but not being as outspoken on American military power abroad.
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I wrote a lot of 'A Time to Kill' at the State Capitol in Jackson, Miss., hiding in little committee rooms, killing time waiting for legislation to come to the floor.
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Each of us has heaven and hell in him...
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A writer's job is to give the reader a larger vision of the world.
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Think about how our country was built. The greatness came from our diversity; the greatness came from individuals with different perspectives coming together.
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Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.
