Will Self Quotes

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 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 a stickler for damn good writing.

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'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.'

It is really important that focusing on things such as spelling, punctuation, grammar and handwriting doesn't inhibit the creative flow. When I was at school there was a huge focus on copying and testing and it put me off words and stories for years.

I have been fighting over commas all my life.

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

In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.

I'd like to take a course in writing. I'm not the best writer in the world. I'd like to write more neatly, even though people don't send many handwritten letters these days.

Everything I write, I read aloud. It has to sound a certain way and look a certain way on page.

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

Machines aren't replacing proofreaders at all. Copy editors, who proofread and much, much more, use spellcheck as a tool but read every word that appears in the paper.

On the 'Star,' you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.

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.

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia.

Writing is just very difficult. I'm an adequate performer. And I think I have a special talent as an editor. Editing is what I do best.

Trying to get the sentences right and the structure of the narration right is about as big a job as I can handle. But I also know that if you handle that job properly, everything else just clicks into place.

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.

Writing is hard - writing is the hardest.

If there's anything I'm keen to get better at in my writing, then it's the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.

I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.

I think my mistakes were kind of common - leaning on cliches and adjectives in the place of clear, vivid writing. But at least I knew how to spell, which seems to be a rarity these days.