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Never feel guilty about reading, it's what you do to do your job.

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
Reading
Jobs
Feel
Feels
Never
Guilty

More quotes by William Safire

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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
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The Latin motto over Poindexter's new Pentagon office reads Scientia Est Potentia - knowledge is power. Exactly: the government's infinite knowledge about you is its power over you.
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A reader ought to be able to hold it and become familiar with its organized contents and make it a mind's manageable companion.
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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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If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself.
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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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The new, old, and constantly changing language of politics is a lexicon of conflict and drama?ridicule and reproach?pleading and persuasion.
William Safire
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The first ladyship is the only federal office in which the holder can neither be fired nor impeached.
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I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.
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President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience.
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[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.
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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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It is in the nature of tyranny to deride the will of the people as the voice of the mob, and to denounce the cry for freedom as the roar of anarchy.
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No one flower can ever symbolize this nation. America is a bouquet.
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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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It behooves us to avoid archaisms. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
William Safire
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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
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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.
William Safire
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As long as one American is hungry... then we have unfinished business in this country.
William Safire
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The most fun in breaking a rule is in knowing what rule you're breaking.
William Safire