William Safire Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

The most fun in breaking a rule is in knowing what rule you're breaking.

At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.

To 'know your place' is a good idea in politics. That is not to say 'stay in your place' or 'hang on to your place', because ambition or boredom may dictate upward or downward mobility, but a sense of place - a feel for one's own position in the control room-is useful in gauging what you should try to do.

English is a stretch language; one size fits all.

The most successful column is one that causes the reader to throw down the paper in a peak of fit.

The perfect Christmas gift for a sportscaster, as all fans of sports clichés know, is a scoreless tie.

What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.

You don't want lopsided government. You don't want one side running roughshod over the other.

No one flower can ever symbolize this nation. America is a bouquet.

Decide on some imperfect Somebody and you will win, because the truest truism in politics is: You can't beat Somebody with Nobody.

I welcome new words, or old words used in new ways, provided the result is more precision, added color or greater expressiveness.

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.

Adapt your style, if you wish, to admit the color of slang or freshness of neologism, but hang tough on clarity, precision, structure, grace.

Adjective salad is delicious, with each element contributing its individual and unique flavor; but a puree of adjective soup tastes yecchy.

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.

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.

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

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.

Better to be a jerk that knees than a knee that jerks.

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.

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.

This is not some alarmist Orwellian scenario; it is here, now, financed by $20 billion last year and $15 billion more this year of federal money appropriated out of sheer fear. By creating the means to monitor 300 million visits to the United States yearly, this administration and a supine opposition are building a system capable of identifying, tracking and spying on 300 million Americans.

Cast aside any column about two subjects. It means the pundit chickened out on the hard decision about what to write about that day.