William Zinsser

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Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person

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The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds

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Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow

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Whenever I listen to an artist or an art historian I'm struck by how much they see and how much they know--and how much I don't.Good art writing should therefore do at least two things. It should teach us how to look: at art, architecture, sculpture, photography and all the other visual components of our daily landscape. And it should give us the information we need to understand what we're looking at

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One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material