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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.

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
Structure
Tough
Slang
Color
Freshness
Grace
Precision
Style
Adapt
Wish
Hang
Clarity
Admit

More quotes by William Safire

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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.
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What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.
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To be accused of 'channeling' is to be dismissed as a ventriloquist's live dummy, derogated at not having a mind of one's own.
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One challenge to the arts in America is the need to make the arts, especially the classic masterpieces, accessible and relevant to today's audience.
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If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself.
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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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Never put the story in the lead. Let 'em have a hot shot of ambiguity right between the eyes.
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Never assume the obvious is true.
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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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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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Color and bite permeate a language designed to rally many men, to destroy some, and to change the minds of others.
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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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Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
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The perfect Christmas gift for a sportscaster, as all fans of sports clichés know, is a scoreless tie.
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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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On the analogy of 'Dictionary Johnson,' we call Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the just-published Yale Book of Quotations (well worth the $50 price), 'Quotationeer Shapiro.' Shapiro does original research, earning his 1,067-page volume a place on the quotation shelf next to Bartlett's and Oxford's.
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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.
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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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Why use a modifier to set straight a not-quite-right noun when the right noun is available?
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A man who lies, thinking it is the truth, is an honest man, and a man who tells the truth, believing it to be a lie, is a liar.
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