Fire and Knowledge

Humor… is urgent work. It’s an attempt to say important things in a special way that regular writers aren’t getting said in a regular way—or if they are, it’s so regular that nobody is reading it.

—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 209.

Humor is the secret weapon of the nonfiction writer. It’s secret because so few writers realize that humor is often their best tool—and sometimes their only tool—for making an important point.

—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 208.

Plain talk will not be easily achieved in corporate America. Too much vanity is on the line. Managers at every level are prisoners of the notion that a simple style reflects a simple mind. Actually a simple style is the result of hard work and hard thinking: a muddled style reflects a muddled thinker or a person too arrogant, or too dumb, or too lazy to organize his thoughts.

—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 175.

But just because people work for an institution, they don’t have to write like one.

—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 167.

If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion; it’s probably one of the countless clichés that have woven their way so tightly into the fabric of travel writing that you have to make a special effort not to use them…. Strive for fresh words and images.

—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 118.

The thing about a weekly column, I discovered, is that it comes up weekly. Now this may seem a self-evident fact, but in two years there never came a week when it did not strike me as both profound an startling. Another column? Already? But I just did one.

—Bill Bryson, I’m a Stranger Here Myself (Broadway Books: 1999), p. xii.

My final and perhaps my best reason for not owning a computer is that I do not wish to fool myself. I disbelieve, and therefore strongly resent, the assertion that I or anybody else could write better or more easily with a computer than with a pencil. I do not see why I should not be as scientific about this as the next fellow: when somebody has used a computer to write work that is demonstrably better than Dante’s, and when this better is demonstrably attributable to the use of a computer, then I will speak of computers with a more respectful tone of voice, though I still will not buy one.

—Wendell Berry, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” in What Are People For? (1990), p. 171.

People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built.

—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 116.