Top 37 Mary Norris Quotes
#1. If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic.
Mary Norris
#2. Has the casual use of profanity in English reached a high tide? That's a rhetorical question, but I'm going to answer it anyway: Fuck yeah.
Mary Norris
#3. The comma, if it's left out, sometimes can be a problem. There's a slogan on a T-shirt going around that "Let's Eat, Grandma," and "Let's Eat Grandma."
Mary Norris
#4. A writer friend who was born in England summed up her feelings for the semicolon in a remark worthy of Henry James: "There is no pleasure so acute as that of a well-placed semicolon." I guess the opposite of that is that there is no displeasure so obtuse as that of an ill-placed semicolon.
Mary Norris
#5. Something there is in cyberspace that doesn't love an apostrophe.
Mary Norris
#6. It's "I felt bad," not "I felt badly," because "to feel badly" would mean "to grope about ineptly." The verb "felt" - definitely a verb of the senses, though not on Gordon's list - fuses the "bad" to the subject, rather than simply using an adverb to modify itself.
Mary Norris
#7. Fiddlesticks" is Scarlett O'Hara's way of saying "Fuck this shit.
Mary Norris
#8. The point is not to let the orthography distract the reader from the meaning.
Mary Norris
#9. Punctuation is a deeply conservative club. It hardly ever admits a new member.
Mary Norris
#10. Was it an insult to be called a "woman writer"? Didn't it have a taint of, say, the "woman driver"?
Mary Norris
#11. Melville has his tics, but he always put his words in the right order. Once you fall under the spell of the writer, you look past those ticks because you are more interested in what the writer says than judging how well he grasped the editorial conventions of his time.
Mary Norris
#12. Those extra letters dangling at the ends of words are the genitalia of grammar.
Mary Norris
#13. The seven words George Carlin said you couldn't say on TV or radio ("fuck," "piss," "shit," "cunt," "motherfucker," "cocksucker," and "tits").
Mary Norris
#14. There is no pleasure so acute as that of a well-placed semi-colon. (the author is actually quoting a friend here)
Mary Norris
#15. So many things in language can never be known or settled or explained, except by custom.
Mary Norris
#16. I have to admit that as a copy editor I agree with the conservatives - my job is to do no harm. But as a person - and as a writer and reader - I am all over the place.
Mary Norris
#17. I can't help but think that the way we punctuate now is the right way - that we are living in a punctuation renaissance.
Mary Norris
#18. There is a phase in the life of every copy editor when she is obsessed with hyphens.
Mary Norris
#20. The dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can't let it push you around.
Mary Norris
#21. First we get the rocks out, Alice. Then we get the pebbles out. Then we get the sand out, and the writer's voice rises. No harm done.
Mary Norris
#22. Commas, like nuns, often travel in pairs.
Mary Norris
#23. Why, if there is alphabet soup, do we not have punctuation cereal?
Mary Norris
#24. Many survivors refuse to talk about what they went through but I've never been ashamed to have been in one of those places. The shame is not mine; the church should be ashamed. They say now they're sorry - what they mean is, sorry they were found out.
Mary Norris
#25. It is just possible that feminists have been literal-minded and, in pursuit of a political goal, have lost their sense of humour.
Mary Norris
#26. I would never disable spell-check. That would be hubris. Autocorrect I could do without.
Mary Norris
#27. In my experience, the really great writers enjoy the editorial process.
Mary Norris
#28. On the printed page, it's best to have everything - you know, to still mind your P's and Q's, dot your I's and cross your T's, yes.
Mary Norris
#29. Sing in me, o Muse, of that small minority of men who are secure enough in their masculinity to use the feminine third-person singular!
Mary Norris
#30. Nobody knows everything-one of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learn-and everybody makes mistakes.
Mary Norris
#31. Whom" may indeed be on the way out, but so is Venice, and we still like to go there.
Mary Norris
#32. The better the writer, the more complicated the dangler.
Mary Norris
#33. Muphry's Law: "If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.
Mary Norris
#34. Everybody is a writer. Everybody uses e-mail and has Facebook pages and tweets.
Mary Norris
#35. Some women bristle, in certain contexts, at being called female: it seems to focus exclusively on the reproductive system, and makes you feel like a chicken, all thighs and breasts.
Mary Norris
#36. The English language is full of words that are just waiting to be misspelled, and the world is full of sticklers, ready to pounce.
Mary Norris
#37. You cannot legislate language. Prohibition never worked, right? Not for booze and not for sex and not for words.
Mary Norris
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