Quotes Tagged: opinions on writing

Nonfiction writing should always have a point: It should leave the reader with a set of facts, or an idea, or a point of view, that he didn’t have before he started reading. Writers may write for any number of good personal reasons—ego, therapy, recollection, validation of their lives. But what they produce will have a validity of its own to the extent that it’s useful to somebody else.

From: Writing to Learn by William Zinsser

[T]he subject—what a book is about—isn’t as important as the qualities of mind or personality that the writer brings to it.

From: Writing to Learn by William Zinsser