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Avoid overuse of 'quotation “marks.”'

William Safire

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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
Overuse
Quotation
Quotations
Marks
Avoid
Mark

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The perfect Christmas gift for a sportscaster, as all fans of sports clichés know, is a scoreless tie.
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Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.
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Create your own constituency of the infuriated.
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English is a stretch language one size fits all.
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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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The wonderful thing about being a New York Times columnist is that it's like a Supreme Court appointment - they're stuck with you for a long time.
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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.
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Decide on some imperfect Somebody and you will win, because the truest truism in politics is: You can't beat Somebody with Nobody.
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Only in grammar can you be more than perfect.
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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.
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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.
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One challenge to the arts in America is the need to make the arts, especially the classic masterpieces, accessible and relevant to today's audience.
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A book should have an intellectual shape and a heft that comes with dealing with a primary subject.
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At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.
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A reader should be able to identify a column without its byline or funny little picture on top purely by look or feel, or its turgidity ratio.
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One difference between French appeasement and American appeasement is that France pays ransom in cash and gets its hostages back while the United States pays ransom in arms and gets additional hostages taken.
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In dealing with Syria's dictator...only force counts. No cease-fire was attainable in Lebanon until the 16-inch guns of the battleship New Jersey started shelling Syria's proxies suddenly, sweet reason prevailed in Damascus.
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[Senators John Kerry & John Edwards] have risen high in Democratic polls with a brand of class resentment and soak-the-rich rhetoric rooted in the old-fashioned liberalism of Ted Kennedy.
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Different regions may require different strategies, as President Bush has noted, but not different basic principles. It's either collective security or selective security.
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By elevating your reading, you will improve your writing or at least tickle your thinking.
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