38 Quotes by Mary Norris

A good dictionary can only help.

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.

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.

Because English has so many words of foreign origin, and words that look the same but mean something different depending on their context, and words that are in flux, opening and closing like flowers in time-lapse photography, the human element is especially important if we are to stay on top of the computers, which, in their determination to do our job for us, make decisions so subversive that even professional wordsmiths are taken by surprise.

Whom" may indeed be on the way out, but so is Venice, and we still like to go there.

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

One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey. And in turn it feeds you more experience.

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

The better the writer, the more complicated the dangler.