38 Quotes by Mary Norris

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

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

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.

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

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.

It is just possible that feminists have been literal-minded and, in pursuit of a political goal, have lost their sense of humour.

Spelling is the clothing of words, their outward visible sign, and even those who favour sweatpants in everyday life like to make a bella figura, as the Italians say – a good impression – in their prose.

Fiddlesticks” is Scarlett O’Hara’s way of saying “Fuck this shit.

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