38 Quotes by Mary Norris

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

You cannot legislate language. Prohibition never worked, right? Not for booze and not for sex and not for words.

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

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

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!

The seven words George Carlin said you couldn’t say on TV or radio (“fuck,” “piss,” “shit,” “cunt,” “motherfucker,” “cocksucker,” and “tits”).

Commas, like nuns, often travel in pairs.

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

I can’t help but think that the way we punctuate now is the right way—that we are living in a punctuation renaissance.