“The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.”
“A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.”
Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 4, Style, p. 21.
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William Zinsser 30
writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, professor 1922–2015Related quotes
“Everybody can write; writers can't do anything else.”
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified
“In the case of a writer like Musil writing is often a graceful act, like a silvery fish leaping.”
p 37
Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1990)
On her views of writing in “Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?” https://www.guernicamag.com/does-truth-have-a-tone/ in Guernica (2013 Jun 17)
“You do not so act as to avoid Hell and enter Heaven.”
Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 27
Arp on Arp: poems, essays, memories. p. 327 (1958)
1950s
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (1985) ed. Sterling McMurrin