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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
Book
Primary
Dealing
Shape
Subject
Shapes
Intellectual
Subjects
Heft
Comes
Primaries
More quotes by William Safire
When duty calls, that is when character counts.
William Safire
Sir Alec Douglas-Home, when he was British Foreign Secretary, said he received the following telegram from an irate citizen: To hell with you. Offensive letter follows.
William Safire
George Washington had a tough second term.
William Safire
The perfect Christmas gift for a sportscaster, as all fans of sports clichés know, is a scoreless tie.
William Safire
Never look for the story in the 'lede.' Reporters are required to put what's happened up top, but the practiced pundit places a nugget of news, even a startling insight, halfway down the column, directed at the politiscenti. When pressed for time, the savvy reader starts there.
William Safire
Have a definite opinion.
William Safire
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
Adjective salad is delicious, with each element contributing its individual and unique flavor but a puree of adjective soup tastes yecchy.
William Safire
When I need to know the meaning of a word, I look it up in a dictionary.
William Safire
When your government, employer, landlord, merchant, banker and local sports team gang up to picture, digitize and permanently record your every activity, you are placed under unprecedented control.
William Safire
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.
William Safire
Create your own constituency of the infuriated.
William Safire
To communicate, put your words in order give them a purpose use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce.
William Safire
You don't want lopsided government. You don't want one side running roughshod over the other.
William Safire
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.
William Safire
Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected.
William Safire
It behooves us to avoid archaisms. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
William Safire
[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.
William Safire
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.
William Safire
I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.
William Safire