Richard Corliss Quotes

I'd rather fiddle with my phone for precious seconds than neglect an apostrophe; I'd rather insert a word laboriously keyed out than resort to predictive texting for a - acceptable to some - synonym.

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 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 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 have been fighting over commas all my life.

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

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.

To write you have to be able to know how to put words together.

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.

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 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 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.

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 am not a grammarian. Maybe my style is eccentric.

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.

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.

I am a stickler for damn good writing.

I leave my editor to put the periods and commas in.

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

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

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.

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