John Edgar Wideman Quotes

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.

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

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 caution against beginning or ending a quotation with ellipses.

I have great respect for the semicolon; it is a mighty handy little fellow.

I'm tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period.

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 have been fighting over commas all my life.

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.

Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking.

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.

Semicolons . . . signal, rather than shout, a relationship. . . . A semicolon is a compliment from the writer to the reader. It says: "I don't have to draw you a picture; a hint will do."

The commas are the most useful and usable of all the stops. It is highly important to put them in place as you go along. If you try to come back after doing a paragraph and stick them in the various spots that tempt you you will discover that they tend to swarm like minnows into sorts of crevices whose existence you hadn't realized and before you know it the whole long sentence becomes immobilized and lashed up squirming in commas. Better to use them sparingly, and with affection, precisely when the need for each one arises, nicely, by itself.

The crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe!

Write one good clean sentence and put a period at the end of it. Then write another one.

Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.

For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word “Book’s” with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker.

I watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.

I hate commas in the wrong places.

In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.

Grammar is the analysis of language.

I'd rather be a comma than a full stop.

Sometimes, when you're writing sentence by sentence, you're not really sure what footprints you're going to fall into, or what ghosts might appear.

I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.