George Bernard Shaw Quotes

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

Every sentence stands on its own. Whether that's fair or not, that's kind of the way it is.

I have to admit that I'm not very good with grammar. They taught grammar in elementary and high school, but I went to public schools, so I never really learned it.

In conversation you can use timing, a look, an inflection. But on the page all you have is commas, dashes, the amount of syllables in a word. When I write, I read everything out loud to get the right rhythm.

I don't want to use quotation marks anymore, I've gone back and forth with them. In Ghosts, I didn't use them, for instance, all the way back in the early eighties.

I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.

A comma . . . catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling, and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table.

It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.

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

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

I know I have a problem with semi-colon abuse and have written page-long sentences. Nobody needs to be reading page-long sentences, at least not written by me.

I am gennerally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc.

Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

I like all things grammatical, and I had already written several books about parts of speech, and even the alphabet, so everything that makes up a sentence and even a word was covered except for punctuation.

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.

I really like grammar. And spelling. I was a spelling-bee kid. I'm hard-core about grammar.

I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.

I have been fighting over commas all my life.

I think in any writing you're paying attention to detail.

I don't know if I officially proofread my father's book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

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

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 used to enjoy using dots where they would be least expected, not at the end of a sentence but in the middle, creating the effect... of a skipped beat. It seemed to me the mind reacted - first!... in dots, dashes, and exclamation points, then rationalized, drew up a brief, with periods.

I'd rather split an infinitive than split an idea.