Mary Norris Quotes

Something there is in cyberspace that doesn't love an apostrophe.

Why, if there is alphabet soup, do we not have punctuation cereal?

Nobody knows everything-one of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learn-and everybody makes mistakes.

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.

There is a phase in the life of every copy editor when she is obsessed with hyphens.

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."

Everybody is a writer. Everybody uses e-mail and has Facebook pages and tweets.

Commas, like nuns, often travel in pairs.

The dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can't let it push you around.

Punctuation is a deeply conservative club. It hardly ever admits a new member.

The English language is full of words that are just waiting to be misspelled, and the world is full of sticklers, ready to pounce.

The better the writer, the more complicated the dangler.

Was it an insult to be called a “woman writer”? Didn’t it have a taint of, say, the “woman driver”?

So many things in language can never be known or settled or explained, except by custom.

Nobody knows everything—one of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learn—and everybody makes mistakes.

If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic.

Those extra letters dangling at the ends of words are the genitalia of grammar.