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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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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
Shapes
Intellectual
Subjects
Heft
Comes
Primaries
Book
Primary
Dealing
Shape
Subject

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Took me a while to get to the point today, but that is because I did not know what the point was when I started.
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Better to be a jerk that knees than a knee that jerks.
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I'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian.
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What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.
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Avoid overuse of 'quotation “marks.”'
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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.
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You don't want lopsided government. You don't want one side running roughshod over the other.
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If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.
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Adjective salad is delicious, with each element contributing its individual and unique flavor but a puree of adjective soup tastes yecchy.
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When duty calls, that is when character counts.
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I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.
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Why use a modifier to set straight a not-quite-right noun when the right noun is available?
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This is what it's all about. From what I could see, you could get a bunch of people together, whip up the press and have some impact.
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The most successful column is one that causes the reader to throw down the paper in a peak of fit.
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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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When I need to know the meaning of a word, I look it up in a dictionary.
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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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Some handsome and ambitious men believe they are above all morality, and a woman's virtue becomes a mere challenge to them.
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The Republicans do not look on the Democrats as the evil empire.
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A dependent clause is like a dependent child: incapable of standing on its own but able to cause a lot of trouble.
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