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

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
Tickle
Elevating
Improve
Least
Reading
Writing
Thinking

More quotes by William Safire

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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.
William Safire
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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.
William Safire
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The perfect Christmas gift for a sportscaster, as all fans of sports clichés know, is a scoreless tie.
William Safire
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Dangling punch lines to forgotten stories remain in the language like the smile of the Cheshire cat.
William Safire
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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.
William Safire
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President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience.
William Safire
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No one flower can ever symbolize this nation. America is a bouquet.
William Safire
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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.
William Safire
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Have a definite opinion.
William Safire
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The first ladyship is the only federal office in which the holder can neither be fired nor impeached.
William Safire
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Previously known for its six syllables of sweetness and light, reconciliation has become the political fighting word of the year.
William Safire
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Better to be a jerk that knees than a knee that jerks.
William Safire
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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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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
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Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.
William Safire
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At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.
William Safire
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The most fun in breaking a rule is in knowing what rule you're breaking.
William Safire
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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.
William Safire
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The CEO era gave rise to the CFO (not certified flying object, as you might imagine, but chief financial officer) and, most recently, the CIO, chief investment officer, a nice boost for the bookkeeper you can't afford to give a raise . . .
William Safire
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When I need to know the meaning of a word, I look it up in a dictionary.
William Safire