Quote

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

William Safire

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Safire
Age: 79 †
Born: 1929
Born: December 17
Died: 2009
Died: September 27
Author
Columnist
Journalist
Writer
New York City
New York
William Lewis Safire
Needs
Dictionary
Meaning
Word
Look
Looks
Need

More quotes by William Safire

Image
Better to be a jerk that knees than a knee that jerks.
William Safire
Image
Sometimes I know the meaning of a word but am tired of it and feel the need for an unfamiliar, especially precise or poetic term, perhaps one with a nuance that flatters my readership's exquisite sensitivity.
William Safire
Image
A man who lies, thinking it is the truth, is an honest man, and a man who tells the truth, believing it to be a lie, is a liar.
William Safire
Image
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
Image
Create your own constituency of the infuriated.
William Safire
Image
What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.
William Safire
Image
Of higher value than any one leader is the cause.
William Safire
Image
Dangling punch lines to forgotten stories remain in the language like the smile of the Cheshire cat.
William Safire
Image
Carter is the best President the Soviet Union ever had.
William Safire
Image
No one flower can ever symbolize this nation. America is a bouquet.
William Safire
Image
I'm a right-wing pundit and have been for many years.
William Safire
Image
Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.
William Safire
Image
Have a definite opinion.
William Safire
Image
On the analogy of 'Dictionary Johnson,' we call Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the just-published Yale Book of Quotations (well worth the $50 price), 'Quotationeer Shapiro.' Shapiro does original research, earning his 1,067-page volume a place on the quotation shelf next to Bartlett's and Oxford's.
William Safire
Image
To communicate, put your words in order give them a purpose use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce.
William Safire
Image
As long as one American is hungry... then we have unfinished business in this country.
William Safire
Image
I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.
William Safire
Image
The remarkable legion of the unremarked, whose individual opinions are not colorful or different enough to make news, but whose collective opinion, when crystallized, can make history.
William Safire
Image
To be accused of 'channeling' is to be dismissed as a ventriloquist's live dummy, derogated at not having a mind of one's own.
William Safire
Image
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
William Safire