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When I need to know the meaning of a word, I look it up in a dictionary.

William Safire

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William Safire
Age: 79 †
Born: 1929
Born: December 17
Died: 2009
Died: September 27
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Columnist
Journalist
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New York City
New York
William Lewis Safire
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More quotes by William Safire

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A book should have an intellectual shape and a heft that comes with dealing with a primary subject.
William Safire
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Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
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The trick is to start early in our careers the stress-relieving avocation that we will need later as a mind-exercising final vocation. We can quit a job, but we quit fresh involvement at our mental peril.
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Never assume the obvious is true.
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... it's Bush's baby, even if he shares its popularization with Gorbachev. Forget the Hitler 'new order' root F.D.R. used the phrase earlier.
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Color and bite permeate a language designed to rally many men, to destroy some, and to change the minds of others.
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Never put the story in the lead. Let 'em have a hot shot of ambiguity right between the eyes.
William Safire
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Better to be a jerk that knees than a knee that jerks.
William Safire
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To communicate, put your words in order give them a purpose use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce.
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The first ladyship is the only federal office in which the holder can neither be fired nor impeached.
William Safire
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You don't want lopsided government. You don't want one side running roughshod over the other.
William Safire
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I want my questions answered by an alert and experienced politician, prepared to be grilled and quoted -- not my hand held by an old smoothie.
William Safire
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The most fun in breaking a rule is in knowing what rule you're breaking.
William Safire
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By elevating your reading, you will improve your writing or at least tickle your thinking.
William Safire
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I think we have a need to know what we do not need to know.
William Safire
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After eating, an epicure gives a thin smile of satisfaction a gastronome, burping into his napkin, praises the food in a magazine a gourmet, repressing his burp, criticizes the food in the same magazine a gourmand belches happily and tells everybody where he ate a glutton empraces the white porcelain alter, or more plainly, he barfs.
William Safire
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Adapt your style, if you wish, to admit the color of slang or freshness of neologism, but hang tough on clarity, precision, structure, grace.
William Safire
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Carter is the best President the Soviet Union ever had.
William Safire
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Cast aside any column about two subjects. It means the pundit chickened out on the hard decision about what to write about that day.
William Safire
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Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.
William Safire