Quote

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.

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
Give
Main
Chin
Littles
Message
Chins
Little
Messages
Skilled
Take
Reader
Punch
Giving
Writer
Deliberately
Like
Wants
Prose
Clause
Knowing
Boxing
Telegraph
Space
Directly
Clauses

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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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Create your own constituency of the infuriated.
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Have a definite opinion.
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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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The remarkable legion of the unremarked, whose individual opinions are not colorful or different enough to make news, but whose collective opinion, when crystallized, can make history.
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The most successful column is one that causes the reader to throw down the paper in a peak of fit.
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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.
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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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I'm willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian.
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You don't overturn a previous court's decisions lightly and I think most Americans are somewhere in the middle on abortion and there's not going to be a revolution here at all.
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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.
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When articulation is impossible, gesticulation comes to the rescue.
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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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I think we have a need to know what we do not need to know.
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