Sonia Sotomayor Quotes

I've gotten very alert not just to mixed metaphor but to any writing mistake.

In true prose everything must be underlined.

'TIME's spell-check always admonishes me whenever I compose a sentence in the passive voice, a warning that is often ignored by me.

Punctuation, is? fun!

I hate commas in the wrong places.

I try to write conversationally; I try to write like people speak and put the emphasis on the right syllable.

And if you want to know why great editors scare the pants off of writers everywhere, read 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' by Lynne Truss. The punctuation police are everywhere!

It's always nice to end your sentences with an exclamation mark, and not a comma.

Being the offspring of English teachers is a mixed blessing. When the film star says to you, on the air, 'It was a perfect script for she and I,' inside your head you hear, in the sarcastic voice of your late father, 'Perfect for she, eh? And perfect for I, also?'

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.

I can't write in a whole lot of different styles, trying to please the highbrows one time and the lowbrows the next. I pretty much have a basic style I employ.

I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

The simplest and cheapest of all reforms within institutional science is to switch from the passive to the active voice in writing about science.

I am not a grammarian. Maybe my style is eccentric.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn't bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

If my mom reads that I'm grammatically incorrect I'll have hell to pay.

I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them.

I'm pretty sure when I need a comma; I'm not so sure about a semicolon.

I don't think, in my entire 18 years as a student, I ever used an exclamation point in an academic paper.

I am a stickler for damn good writing.

In the course of my research, I've read a lot of incredibly bad books - mostly by academics. I'm puzzled as to just why their writing is so terrible. These are smart people, after all.

Thurber was asked by a correspondent: "Why did you have a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living-room'?" And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. "This particular comma," Thurber explained, "was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.

Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.