Quote

By elevating your reading, you will improve your writing or at least tickle your thinking.

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
Elevating
Improve
Least
Reading
Writing
Thinking
Tickle

More quotes by William Safire

Image
If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself.
William Safire
Image
When articulation is impossible, gesticulation comes to the rescue.
William Safire
Image
English is a stretch language one size fits all.
William Safire
Image
Better to be a jerk that knees than a knee that jerks.
William Safire
Image
I welcome new words, or old words used in new ways, provided the result is more precision, added color or greater expressiveness.
William Safire
Image
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
Image
In lieu of those checks and balances central to our legal system, non-citizens face an executive that is now investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and jailer or executioner. In an Orwellian twist, Bush's order calls this Soviet-style abomination 'a full and fair trial.'
William Safire
Image
As long as one American is hungry... then we have unfinished business in this country.
William Safire
Image
I'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian.
William Safire
Image
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.
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
The Republicans do not look on the Democrats as the evil empire.
William Safire
Image
Have a definite opinion.
William Safire
Image
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.
William Safire
Image
When duty calls, that is when character counts.
William Safire
Image
A reader ought to be able to hold it and become familiar with its organized contents and make it a mind's manageable companion.
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
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
Image
[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
Image
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