"This is a book by a writer who does some teaching, not a book by a teacher who does some writing, and one of the satisfactions of the craft is that there's always something new to learn."

William Zinsser Literature See all quotes by William Zinsser →

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“You must find some way to elevate your act of writing into entertainment.”

“If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.”

“Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.”

“Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.”

“The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.”

“All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Music has to do with sounds, so we need to find them somewhere and it is preferred to find musical ones. You have two sources for sounds: noises, which always tell you something — a door cracking, a d…"

— Pierre Schaeffer

Literature1910–1995

#wisdom

"Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying."

— Evelyn Waugh

Journalism1903–1966

#education

"People always called The Cure gloomy, but listening to The Cure made me happy. There was something about the gloominess that gave me comfort, and I think we're the same way."

— Billy Corgan

Music1967

#happiness

"Mass education cannot work to produce a fair society because its daily practice is practice in rigged competition, suppression and intimidation. The schools we’ve allowed to develop can’t work to teac…"

— John Taylor Gatto

Literature1935–2018

#education