“Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.”
Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 3, Clutter, p. 13
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William Zinsser 30
writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, professor 1922–2015Related quotes

“A promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made.”
Appendix.
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822-1856)

“Anxiety increases in direct ratio and proportion as man departs from God.”
Source: Peace of Soul (1949), Ch. 2, p. 19

Statement of Poisson's law also known as the Law of Large Numbers (1837), as quoted by [Richard Von Mises, Probability, Statistics and Truth, Allen and Unwin, 1957, 104-105]

“You either have to write or you shouldn't be writing. That's all.”

LIFE magazine (8 March 1929)
Context: Nine-tenths of the value of a sense of humor in writing is not in the things it makes one write but in the things it keeps one from writing. It is especially valuable in this respect in serious writing, and no one without a sense of humor should ever write seriously. For without knowing what is funny, one is constantly in danger of being funny without knowing it.

Review of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

“There are alway going to be bad things. But you can write it down and make a song out of it.”