Fire and Knowledge

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.

Whatever form of nonfiction you write, it will come alive in proportion to the number of ‘quotes’ you can weave into it as you go along.

—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 101.

Writing is like a good watch – it should run smoothly and have no extra parts.

—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 85.

There’s not much to be said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.

—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 71.

The perfect ending should take your readers slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly right. They didn’t expect the article to end so soon, or so abruptly, or to say what is said. But they know it when they see it.

—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, pp. 65-6.

[Y]our readers hear the laborious sound of cranking. They notice what you are doing and how bored you are by it. They feel the stirrings of resentment. Why didn’t you give more thought to how you were going to wind this thing up? Or are you summarizing because you think they’re too dumb to get the point? Still, you keep cranking. But the readers have another option. They quit.

–William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 65.

Like the minister’s sermon that builds to a series of perfect conclusions that never conclude, an article that doesn’t stop where it should stop becomes a drag and therefore a failure.

–William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 64.