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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.

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
Wonderful
Columnist
Times
Columnists
Thing
Appointment
Long
Appointments
Time
Stuck
Like
Supreme
Court
York

More quotes by William Safire

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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.
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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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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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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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Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
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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.
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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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Give your main clause a little space. Prose is not like boxing the skilled writer deliberately telegraphs his punch, knowing that the reader wants to take the message directly on the chin.
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Never put the story in the lead. Let 'em have a hot shot of ambiguity right between the eyes.
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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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Create your own constituency of the infuriated.
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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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We are all environmentalists now, but we are not all planetists. An environmentalist realizes that nature has its pleasures and deserves respect. A planetist puts the earth ahead of the earthlings.
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The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.
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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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You don't want lopsided government. You don't want one side running roughshod over the other.
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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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By elevating your reading, you will improve your writing or at least tickle your thinking.
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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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President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience.
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