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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
Feel
Feels
Never
Guilty
Reading
Jobs

More quotes by 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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Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
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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I'm a right-wing pundit and have been for many years.
William Safire
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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.
William Safire
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The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.
William Safire
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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
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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
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Carter is the best President the Soviet Union ever had.
William Safire
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Avoid overuse of 'quotation “marks.”'
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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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.
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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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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Never put the story in the lead. Let 'em have a hot shot of ambiguity right between the eyes.
William Safire
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The tension between the governed and the governing is what makes the world go 'round. It's not love, it's that tension, because that tension exists in love affairs. The whole idea of control is at the heart of human relationships. Control and resistance to control.
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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Better to be a jerk that knees than a knee that jerks.
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 new, old, and constantly changing language of politics is a lexicon of conflict and drama?ridicule and reproach?pleading and persuasion.
William Safire