William Safire Quotes

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.

One thing that drives me nuts... well, let me ask you, when writers write do they not use quotation marks anymore?

You can't have many exclamation points left,' thought Anne, 'but no doubt the supply of italics is inexhaustible.

I caution against beginning or ending a quotation with ellipses.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

Anyone who's taken a lot of creative-writing classes, or taught creative writing, has learned to dread a certain kind of manuscript. It's long, for one thing. It has irritatingly small type; it's grammatically meticulous when it comes to everything but punctuation, for which it has developed its own system of Tolkienic elaboration.

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

In true prose everything must be underlined.

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 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.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it..

Nothin'g sa'ys q'uality fantas'y l'ike misuse'd apos'tro'phes.

I might not use capital letters. But I would definitely use an apostrophe…and probably a period. I’m a huge fan of punctuation.

Rilla was fond of italics, as most girls of fifteen are.

I will say that the thing that I use too much, and I need to stop, but the F-word is pretty great. When you say it, it's so viscerally strong. It also serves as a great punctuation point - it can really emphasize how dumb something is.

When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.

In the nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography, man compositors were encouraged to stuff extra space between sentences. Generations of twentieth-century typists were then taught to do the same, by hitting the spacebar twice after every period. Your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victorian habit.

The censure of frequent and long parentheses has led writers into the preposterous expedient of leaving out the marks by which they are indicated. It is no cure to a lame man to take away his crutches.

I don't enjoy lettering very much, but that's the way I write and that belongs in the strip because the strip is a reflection of me.

It should come as no surprise that writers take an interest in punctuation. I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, "I should have used fewer semicolons" - and although I have spent months fruitlessly trying to track down the chap responsible, I believe it none the less. If it turns out that no one actually did say this on their deathbed, I shall certainly save it up for my own.

A reader should be able to identify a column without its byline or funny little picture on top purely by look or feel, or its turgidity ratio.

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism

I would die at the stake rather than change a semi-colon!

A tired exclamation mark is a question mark.