Mick Foley Quotes

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.

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 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 still don't know whether I know how to write a sentence.

Names and other proper nouns shouldn't distract from the language.

I come out of journalism, and then book writing. There, it's just you and your editor and maybe a copy desk, looking over your editor's shoulder, and that's the story. It's right there. I can show it to you because it's on paper.

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

A very good editor is almost a collaborator.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

I'm very bad at ending sentences. A lot times I just want to say, 'That's the end of my sentence. I have nothing more to say.'

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.

A good editor understands what you're talking and writing about and doesn't meddle too much.

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.

The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.

I'm really happy to have the chance to talk about the editing process. It's something that I think doesn't get the weight it deserves, especially with the rise of self-publishing.

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

Like all editors, I assume, I'm a reactor.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

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.

In my experience, copy editors, like the stalwart staff I've worked with and learned from in my 34 years at 'TIME,' are linguistic conservatives - the keepers of the flame ignited by the Strunk-White 'Elements of Style,' published in full in 1957 and chosen by 'TIME' as one of the 100 most influential nonfiction books of the past century.

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